“This is a University isn’t it?”
By Alan Fimister | 24 September 2025
During my doctoral studies at the University of Aberdeen, I and a number of like-minded students sought to establish a Pro-Life Society. This required the acquiescence of the Aberdeen University Students’ Association, whose office holders, reflecting the pieties of late modernity, wished to prevent the establishment of such a society and, at the same time, to avoid being seen as suppressing free speech. Anticipating their desire to find technical objections to the establishment of a society committed to the defence of human life, we adopted completely unaltered the “model constitution” from the Students’ Association’s own website, depriving them of the possibility of objecting to any of its provisions. There were however two blank sections in the “model constitution”: the name and the aims of the proposed society. The name we adopted was, straightforwardly, “The Aberdeen University Pro-Life Society”; the aims we proposed were, “To convince everyone studying and working at the University of Aberdeen of the sanctity and inviolability of human life from conception (that is, fertilisation) until natural death”.
The relevant committee of the Aberdeen University Students’ Association having no other option (other than to simply accept the establishment of the society) objected to the aims. After a short period of Kafkaesque procrastination they grudgingly agreed to meet with us. They were worried we might be violent. Why, we inquired, would it be reasonable to fear violence from a society whose very raison d’etre was to convince everyone studying and working at the University of Aberdeen of the sanctity and inviolability of human life? Perhaps, they suggested, we were planning to picket the rooms of students suspected of having had abortions? Obviously, that would be absurd, and we had no such intentions. Perhaps we could include in our constitution a declaration that we reject violence? Absolutely not, because that would imply it would be reasonable to suspect us of violent intentions. Would they make such a demand of the Islamic Society or Irish Society?
After a lot of mumbling it was explained that the problem was the word “convince”; this, apparently, implied violence. We produced various dictionaries showing that the word convince did not imply violence. Dictionary definitions, they explained, do not reflect the real world implication of a word. We pointed out that this was exactly what the dictionaries purported to do. No, no, they explained, for our generation “convince” implies violence. That was not our experience, we objected. Well, it was theirs. All right, we asked what word would they suggest? They suggested “discuss” — “To discuss with everyone studying and working at the University of Aberdeen the sanctity and inviolability of human life from conception (that is, fertilisation) until natural death”. No, we weren’t having that. That would imply we were neutral on the subject of the sanctity and inviolability of human life and just thought it would be a stimulating topic to investigate.
What about “persuade”, we suggested. We would be happy to change the word to “persuade”. Did they think “persuade” implies violence? There was some discomfort at this question as even they clearly didn’t think the word “persuade” implied violence (or could be plausibly presented as doing so) but they also didn’t want to accept the suggestion as they would then have no remaining basis for refusing to allow the establishment of the society.
Finally, one of them ventured the following explanation: “The problem is that you think something and other people think something else and you want them to stop thinking what they think and to start thinking what you think”. “Yes,” I replied, “this is a university isn’t it?” This question was considered so offensive that the meeting was then terminated.
“The truth,” the Vatican II document, Dignitatis Humanae, teaches us, “cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” In a moving statement made not long before his death, Charlie Kirk observed, particularly in regard to the fairer sex, that “Mary is the solution … be reverent, be full of faith, slow to anger, slow to words at times”. Mr Kirk’s apostolate seemed to have one central theme above all: that if people are simply polite, reasonable and charitable to each other the vast majority will reach positions concordant with natural law. Being “slow to words at times” is a crucial part of such politeness, reasonableness and charity. His silencing through assassination seems rather to confirm his point that his opponents cannot meet him on rational grounds; that, to reverse the terms of Dignitatis Humanae, that which cannot impose itself by virtue of its own truth, or make its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power, is not the truth, cannot by its own nature impose itself and must be imposed by other means.
As St Ignatius of Antioch, the disciple of St John the Evangelist and second successor of St Peter at Antioch, observes, the Word, the Logos, proceeds in silence. Cardinal Newman, in the last of his sermons preached at the University of Oxford, reflected on the words of the evangelist Luke: “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19), noting:
“Little is told us in Scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin, but there is one grace of which the Evangelists make her the pattern, in a few simple sentences—of Faith. Faith is born of the reason that knows that it is created and finite that there is more than it knows or can know, that to speak incessantly and drown out the voice of one’s interlocutor — or to silence it by other means — is to deafen oneself to the voice of God. ‘Today if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts’ (Psalm 94:8).”
The American Byzantine Bl Miriam Teresa Demjanovitch observes that this conception of the logos in our hearts requires a very special preparation, the silence which makes room for reason is born of humility,
“Some of us are too apt, however, in venerating the Blessed Virgin — and who among the creatures of God is deserving of higher honour? — to overlook one thing, very important, and recognised most clearly by Mary herself. She gave expression to this thought in her sublime hymn of praise and thanksgiving when she said: ‘He that is mighty hath done great things to me’ (Luke 1:49). Why, we may ask? The answer comes back: ‘Because he hath regarded the humility of His handmaiden’ (Luke 1:48). Unlike Mary, we are too prone, in our admiration of the gifts, even the gifts we perceive in her, to forget the Giver, the bountiful Father of all. Mary never forgot. Mary never forgot because she was humble. It was this very humility which drew forth the Eternal Word from the bosom of the Father to repose Incarnate in the bosom of Mary.”
The distinguishing feature of the tyrant and the would-be tyrant is the hardness of his heart, the refusal to hear the voice of another or to respond with reason but to drown out the voice of the other or, finally, silence it with violence.
Everyone believes that he is right about everything. That is why we think what we think. But to be certain that one is right about anything, except by the light of faith and reason, is madness, since the only authority whose authority alone makes a proposition worthy of assent is God. Conversely, to pretend that one esteems one’s opinion no more than any other is to grant oneself the privilege of speaking with divine authority, to attribute to oneself the right to demand assent purely on the basis of one’s own authority as if one could neither deceive nor be deceived. Why would one hold an opinion that one thought was no better than anyone else’s unless one thought that the fact that one held it made it worthy of assent? Reason being thus banished, persuasion is simply violence and the silencing of another’s voice by blade or bullet is no more than self-defence.
What then is law? Is it not the imposition of one opinion on another by force? Of no true law is this true. Man, Dignitatis Humanae tells us, “is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience.” (3) But there is no harm in forcing man to act in accordance with his conscience! In most respects we cannot tell what a man’s conscience is telling him but we know that the ten precepts of the moral law, are written upon his heart (Romans 2:15). When a man blasphemes, dishonours God or his parents, kills, commits adultery, steals, lies or covets he acts against his conscience. This is why Leo XIII defines law as “a fixed rule of teaching what is to be done and what is to be left undone”. When the registrar from Kentucky refused to issue “gay marriage” licences, she ought not to have appealed to religious liberty but to reason itself. It is tyranny to require someone on pain of dismissal to profess that 2+2=5.
As Michael Knowles has observed in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, it is all too easy to demand a “free marketplace of ideas” but:
“Marketplaces require rules, confidence, and common media of exchange. They require, in other words, order. Liberty requires order. One cannot be both free and undisciplined, for instance, or free and ignorant. We know this philosophically, and we also know it intuitively. It’s why we don’t let toddlers vote. What we require now is the reassertion of order. We must insist upon the acceptance of basic truths and moral goods, not as the asymptotic goal of endless debate but as the axiomatic foundation without which debate cannot occur. We must foreclose certain antisocial behaviours and suicidal ideologies. We must, to borrow a phrase from Chesterton, stop ‘the thought that stops thought.’ In practical terms, this means we must stigmatize certain evil ideas and behaviours, and we must ostracize people who insist upon them … A good place to begin would be with those who celebrate the murder of an innocent man.”