Clever, Inquisitive, Contrarian

Of events going back to when the Conservatives were in office, five of Reform UK’s eight MPs were Conservative Party members, four were Conservative MPs, and two were Cabinet Ministers, Kathleen Stock (apparently she no longer uses “Professor”) writes:

Back when I worked at Sussex University, I sat through a lot of meetings. To relieve the tedium, I used to note changing fashions in language; bureaucratic phrases arriving from other institutions and working their way mimetically through management brains. As I remember it, there was a lot of dizzying movement: many deep dives into data and much drilling into figures; endless circling back, driving forward, and cascading downwards. The contrast with our sedentary laptop lifestyle was marked.

Policy documents would arrive full of empty second-hand phrases, awkwardly strung together. For instance: “The curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people, and any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives.” This was one of several overbearing clauses in Sussex’s “Trans and Nonbinary Equality Policy Statement”, launched with internal fanfare in 2018. The wording came from a template provided by Advance HE, an organisation supposedly concerned with improving teaching standards in the higher education sector. It was robotically copied by several universities, Sussex among them.

Last year, the Office for Students issued a large fine to Sussex on the basis of introducing this policy, and cited my adverse experiences there as evidence of its chilling effect on academic freedom. Indeed, while I was working as a philosophy lecturer, attempting to broach thorny issues of sex and gender while avoiding disciplinary investigations from management, the mere sight of a link to this particular policy in an official email would cause significant clenching of my jaw. But this Wednesday, the passive-aggressive wording sidled back into my life, to enrich my dentist further. The High Court ruled that the fine had been unlawful, and the Office for Students had misapplied its own rules.

Central to the judgment was the finding that the trans policy did not in fact count as a “governing document” — meaning that the Office for Students was wrong to conclude it ever seriously breached their regulations. Yet on the ground at the time, the policy felt very much like a governing document. Indeed, it seemed positively Stalinesque in its effect. It combined with several other EDI policies and communications to inculcate a general feeling of menace: warnings about transphobia and hate speech; instructions about preferred pronouns and how exactly to apologise if you got them wrong; links to helplines for those affected by speech-based bigotry, and trans flags fluttering all over the shop.

But according to this week’s ruling, “governing documents” in this context only ever means constitutional texts such as statutes and charters, not policies attempting to force change in cultural values or behavioural norms. And the judge also ruled that the OFS failed to consider other Sussex policies defending freedom of speech, supposedly more definitive of the institutional stance — though as I recall, these were squirrelled away in remote corners of the website, given far less prominence in everyday life.

There are other points in the ruling, less easy to paraphrase. Though the overall verdict is clear enough — the OFS messed up badly, misunderstood its own regulations, and also showed bias in its determination to make an example of Sussex — much of the text is taken up with the byzantine interaction of particular OFS regulations and Sussex documents, not easy for the non-specialist to decipher. Still, other matters are made transparently clear. As pertaining to the OFS’s academic freedom director, Arif Ahmed, for instance, the judge explicitly found that there was “no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making”, and that Sussex’s attempts to demonstrate otherwise had failed.

But history is written by the victors, as they say; and yesterday the victorious Vice-Chancellor Sasha Roseneil was doing the media rounds, calling for Ahmed’s head nonetheless. Originally a Cambridge philosopher of language, he is well-known within free speech circles for his refreshingly unadorned critiques of emotional safetyism within universities, including an earlier successful fight to see Cambridge remove a regulation requirement to be “respectful” towards opposing points of view. It would be completely in keeping with our times to see a confident plain speaker like him ousted by someone whose warm and fuzzy aim for her organisation, as of yesterday, is to “continue to focus on creating an open, inclusive and respectful campus culture”.

Though herself a sociologist, Roseneil also seemed in the mood to do a bit of historical reconstruction, waxing lyrical about the university’s “proud history of being the place where the most contentious issues of the day are aired”. During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister even went so far as to call the university a “bastion of free speech”. Reader, I laughed. Perhaps it was once so, and could be again; I have no idea, having relinquished my former connections. But it may not surprise you to learn that this is not my recollection of the place; and nor can it really be Roseneil’s. She arrived to run it in 2022, a year after I had left.

I have described my Sussex experiences too often to rehearse them here again. By now, I am quite bored of remembering, so God knows how everyone else feels. But for an economical snapshot of what life was like back then, consider the tone and content of this “Dean’s update” email, sent by my line manager to all staff in the arts and humanities in April 2021, including me, and preserved on the internet for posterity. In particular, attend to the lengthy sections on “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ inclusion”, bearing in mind that this deathless managerial prose was composed years after my public complaints about Stonewall’s overreach had first attracted local acts of animosity, and five months before the large scale protests against me started. And if you think this sounds like an “open” or even “respectful” environment in which to criticise the presence of males in women’s prisons or the medical transition of minors, I have an extremely scientific encyclopaedia of gender identities to sell you.

For those who are big fans of such things, I’m sure the High Court result will be triumphantly received as proof that stories about my tumultuous time at Sussex were always overdone. The judge stated in her ruling that she was not adjudicating on the substance of those events, about which the then-Vice-Chancellor expressed profound regret at the time. Roseneil also stressed the separateness of the two matters in her own statement. But in my experience, you can’t expect people who believe in magical gender essences to care much about finer details. In any case, whatever they are saying I’m not reading it, having blissfully given up monitoring my public image in the eyes of such people a long time ago.

For related reasons, I am not clued up on exactly what this means for the sector as a whole; and nor do I really wish to remedy the deficit. But from 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.