Well since Jo Johnson has decided to ruin Boxing Day, let’s have a little think about this article in the Times. 
There's ultimately two substantive points here: Johnson believes that universities need to be forced to protect 'freedom of speech', and a group of Oxford academics has recently been involved in an attack on it.
It's worth noting that academic freedom of speech is already protected by the Higher Education Act of 1988, something I learnt when my institution used it to protect my academic freedom of speech from a homophobic attack.
On the other hand, the examples given in the article all refer to occasions when student unions or societies have a formal policy of no-platforming. This is different.
A university can have protected freedom of speech at the same time as an SU has a policy of no-platforming, because the SU is a membership organisation which can decide to invite or not invite who it chooses.
We don't have a right to be invited to speak to organisations. I don't have a right to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, for example. This is not a freedom of speech issue.
Ironically though, Johnson is actually proposing a framework which would allow the kind of no-platforming he claims to be against.
The idea seems to be that speakers who are 'discriminatory', which is equated with racism and antisemitism, should actually be barred.
But this could easily be interpreted to include those whose discrimination was aimed at trans students, which means there'd be a strong argument for banning Germaine Greer!
The major example used, though, is the letter by 58 Oxford historians about the Ethics and Empire project. This is odd, but the context of course is that Prof. Biggar's controversial article was also in the Times.
As many people have pointed out more eloquently than me, the 58 Oxford scholars are engaging in debate, not an attack on freedom of speech.
There have been some voices I've seen arguing the Empire project should be shut down, which you could interpret as attack on freedom of speech, but they have very much been outliers.
Even the more forthright letter from around 170 scholars, which argues that Oxford University shouldn't be providing money to the project, are not attacking freedom of speech.
What universities choose to fund is an important part of the HE conversation, and sometimes that involves people arguing that some projects should or shouldn't be funded.
This, of course, is no more a freedom of speech issue than when people argue universities should, say, make ethical investments or disinvest in fossil fuels.
So if the idea is nonsense, and the 'threat' is largely made up, we have to ask ourselves why? Why now?
Is Johnson trying to attack universities as unreliable and politically biased? Trying to create a narrative where our ideas and research and critiques are tainted? Who might benefit from that?
Or is it a generational thing? Is this part of a wider attack on 'millennial culture'?
Or is it just a newspaper narrative? Parts of the press have decided that students can be portayed as 'snowflakes', so why not add to that narrative?
In any case, the article is full of logical flaws, and Johnson's ideas appear half-formed at best, part of a wider attack by government on universities. An attack which I think is becoming increasingly dangerous if we want a mature public conversation in these difficult times.
