The University of Sussex has just been introduced to the consequences of its own hideous, illiberal actions. And how! In the first ruling of its kind, since new powers in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 came into force, the Office for Students (OfS) has issued the south-coast university with a £585,000 fine over its failure to uphold academic freedom and free speech.
Thus concludes a three-and-half-year investigation into a truly shameful episode. In 2021, philosophy professor Kathleen Stock resigned from Sussex, following a years-long campaign to have her sacked, waged by staff and students, over her gender-critical beliefs. What the censors called ‘protest’ against a ‘transphobe’ was, in fact, harassment and intimidation against a leading academic for the crime of grasping basic biology, for advocating for sex-based rights, for raising the alarm against the NHS’s medical experimentation on ‘gender-confused’ – often gay – children, which left many of them irreversibly harmed. What a monster, eh?
Masked protesters lit flares and scrawled ‘STOCK OUT’ on campus. Death threats filled her inbox. The police advised her to stay away from work. Security cameras were fitted in her home. Her ‘personal tipping point’, Stock has said, came when the Sussex branch, her branch, of the UCU union put out a statement backing the protesters against the ‘transphobe’, against the witch, against her. For years, Stock had also been raising the alarm with management over policies she said had led academics to self-censor on gender issues, and had fuelled the ‘medieval’ climate at Sussex.
This is where the OfS comes in. While the regulator doesn’t have the power to act on Stock’s behalf, or for any individual, her ousting led it to investigate the university’s processes and policies. The OfS has now ruled that Sussex’s ‘Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement’ had a ‘chilling effect’ on Stock and others, breaching its legal obligations to uphold freedom of speech. Decisions about governance were also being made improperly, the OfS says. The already-hefty fine could have been substantially heftier.
For her part, Sussex vice-chancellor Sasha Roseneil has come out swinging, dubbing the ruling ‘partisan’, ‘disproportionate’ and ‘Kafka-esque’. As well she might. In a desperate lunge for the moral high ground, Roseneil has insisted that Sussex was only trying to ‘protect the welfare of transgender staff and students’, and that she has ‘grave concerns about the implications’ of the OfS’s ruling for all ‘minoritised groups’ going forward.
You’d think the policy in question had banned discrimination, harassment or abuse levelled at trans people. In truth, it banned ‘transphobic propaganda’, which has effectively become code for ‘anything that dares to question gender ideology’. Sussex also required ‘any materials within relevant courses and modules [to] positively represent trans people and trans lives’ – an extraordinary diktat, an affront to academic freedom, that could well make criticising ‘Isla Bryson’, ‘Karen White’, or any of the other rapists who have talked their way into women’s prisons of late, a risky business.
Roseneil says she will see the OfS in court, accusing it of being uncooperative and refusing to meet her in person. We’ll see how that pans out. But the legal niceties aside, the moral rights and wrongs of this case are visible from space. Sussex, like so many other universities, didn’t simply junk freedom of speech and academic freedom, as if they were nice-to-haves rather than the ballast of the entire academic enterprise. No. It also stood idly by as one of its own was menaced – and, arguably, it contributed to the intolerance and hysteria. While Sussex issued some limp statements of support for Stock over the years, it was, at the same time, inking policies that could have been written by the ‘protesters’.
This is the often-unspoken truth about British universities’ embrace of speech-policing. While the focus is usually on crybully students with more piercings than sense, university bureaucrats have always been a sizeable part of the problem. They have presided over bureaucracies that define and punish wrongthink, as if they were running mini theocracies rather than Enlightened seats of learning. They have consistently gone way beyond what the law requires of them in terms of limiting speech, even before the new Free Speech Act came into force. The reason they have often looked weak and ineffectual in the face of campus cancel culture is because, while they might disagree with the tactics of student no-platformers, they undoubtedly agree with the broader sentiment.
spiked has been railing against campus censorship for all of our 25 years. While centrist bores were dismissing it as the theatrics of blue-haired students, we could see where this was all going, how corrosive it would be to Western liberal life, and that it clearly wasn’t just the kids. University managers had been captured by identitarian illiberalism, too. Whether they censor out of fear or zealotry, the outcome is the same – academics cancelled, students policed, events shut down, harassers given the green light.
Back in 2015, we launched the Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR), a nationwide survey of campus censorship that helped to put this issue firmly on the political map. Over the four years we pored over the policies and bans of universities, two things became abundantly clear: censorship was at genuinely epidemic proportions and the universities were as much to blame as the students’ unions, with their No Platform blacklists and Safe Spaces. In 2018, we found that almost half of campuses held policies clamping down on trans-related speech and the vast majority of the most severe restrictions were imposed by universities. Remember Sussex’s ban on ‘transphobic propaganda’? Near-identical measures were also in place at Newcastle, Imperial, Leeds Beckett and Cardiff, as if they were all copied and pasted from Stonewall.
The misconception that this censorship was being pushed by campus radicals, rather than university management, has served the latter a little too well. In 2017, I was invited to discuss the FSUR at a meeting of parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. I was sat next to the then vice-chancellor of Cardiff, who spent his time trashing our findings before taking credit for pushing back against attempts to cancel a speech at Cardiff by feminist icon Germaine Greer, then the most iconic gender critic. I gently pointed out to him that his university itself banned ‘transphobic’ material from courses – precisely the heresy Greer was accused of propagating. He stropped for the rest of the meeting.
Will huge fines free our campuses from censorship? I’m sceptical. No doubt it will become more covert than overt. What we really need is a cultural change, among students, academics, maybe even a few managers – a new culture of freedom strong enough to deflect both official sanction and bottom-up cancellation. But there can be no doubt now how rotten British academic life has become. And it has rotted from the head down.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
