Universities must meet their obligations to uphold free speech and academic freedom, the UK’s higher education regulator warned on Sunday, days after a professor resigned following dissension with transgender activists. James Wharton, chairman of the Office for Students (OfS), said the office requires universities to have mechanisms in place to protect these freedoms and to apply them in practice. He also said the OfS is “working closely with the government” on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which will put more legal duties on universities and colleges to protect free speech on campus. Writing in The Telegraph on Sunday, Wharton stressed that respectful debate is an “essential life skill” that students will need before stepping into the wider world, where they will be confronted with “ideas and philosophies that they are uncomfortable with, [or] even offended by.” “Students attending our universities should have their understanding of the world around them stretched, and their …