Mick Hartley

The hefty fine imposed on Sussex University by the Office for Students for its failure to support academic freedom has been overturned by the High Court. Central to the OFS case was the experience of Kathleen Stock, forced out by the Sussex ideologues for her failure to comply with the obligatory trans-worship. Now, happy to have said goodbye to the stifling atmosphere of forced conformity, she speaks out at UnHerd:

[F]rom the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicised documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fuelling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicised commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgement is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasise the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fuelled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.  

In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

So the culture that imposes conformity of thought, and chills free speech on campus, is allowed to remain intact and unchallenged.