Committee for Academic Freedom

🚨 BREAKING: Another win for #academicfreedom! After intervention from the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), Plymouth Marjon University has restored the emeritus title of Dr David Harris, which was withdrawn last year after he published a critique of critical race theory. Internal emails secured via a Subject Access Request (SAR) show senior administrators describing Professor Harris’s research as “controversial” and suggesting the university should “sever ties”. CAF challenged the decision as procedurally improper and inconsistent with the terms under which his emeritus title had originally been awarded. The university has now reversed course and reinstated the title. As our Research Manager Freddie Attenborough told The Telegraph: “The episode raises serious questions about how easily lawful academic research can end up being labelled ‘controversial’ inside university administration, with damaging consequences for the individuals involved.” Professor Harris isn’t the first emeritus scholar we’ve had to defend — and we doubt he’ll be the last. 🙏 Much of CAF’s work, from supporting members in difficult cases to holding universities to account for breaches of #freespeech law, is only possible because of donations from supporters. If you’d like to help us continue and expand this work in defence of academic freedom, you can donate here: donorbox.org/support-the-co… 📩 Subscribe to our newsletter to see how CAF is pushing back against free speech breaches across UK universities: afcomm.org.uk/updates-from-t… 📰 Read the full story in The Telegraph here: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/1…

STATEMENT: Following the High Court ruling in R (University of Sussex) v Office for Students, Sussex VC Professor Sasha Roseneil is calling for a regulator that “works with the sector”, while also offering to “work with the government” on “better ways to regulate and support” universities. The Office for Students (OfS) is a specialist regulator with a clear statutory remit to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom. Its purpose is not to rubber-stamp institutional preferences or create opportunities for senior leadership to mark its own homework in an atmosphere of backslapping bonhomie. It is to ensure universities meet their statutory duties, including where overreaching EDI policies, misstated harassment codes, mandated “decolonisation” programmes or anonymous micro-aggression reporting portals threaten lawful speech. These examples are not plucked from thin air. At CAF we see the chilling effect they have in our casework. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA) was introduced after years of sector-wide failure to address these and similar drivers of campus cancel culture — including at Sussex, where Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded from her post over her gender-critical views amid a sustained campaign against her and a conspicuously passive leadership. The trans inclusion policy at the centre of the High Court’s ruling, which formed part of the OfS investigation that led to Sussex’s legal challenge, required course materials to “positively represent trans people and trans lives”. The OfS concluded, not unreasonably, that such wording risked chilling lawful speech and academic freedom. As the judgment itself makes clear, it was not irrational for the regulator to conclude that the policy, read in isolation, was capable of having a “significant and severe” impact on free speech. This ruling was indeed critical of how the OfS exercised its powers under the then extant legal framework, but we should not allow that to become a pretext for backsliding now that HEFSA is in operation. Professor Roseneil calls for “better ways to regulate and support” universities. The forthcoming OfS free speech complaints scheme, and strengthened free speech conditions, are precisely that: giving the regulator the tools Parliament intended to hold the sector to account — something Education Secretary @bphillipsonMP and Skills Minister @Jacqui_Smith1 should now ensure is delivered without delay. timeshighereducation.com/news/sussex-wi…

The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), together with a group of leading academics and campaigners, has written to Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson (@bphillipsonMP) and Minister for Skills Baroness Jacqui Smith (@Jacqui_Smith1) urging the Government to proceed without delay with new #freespeech protections for universities following this week’s High Court judgment in the Sussex case. The letter, organised by CAF Advisory Board member Professor @ObhishekSaha, warns that some university leaders may seek to use the judgment as a pretext to resist the commencement of key provisions in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. In fact, the judgment shows precisely why these provisions — in particular the new complaints scheme — should be brought into force as soon as possible. If, as the ruling suggests, the existing enforcement route under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 depends on a restrictive interpretation of what counts as a “governing document”, the OfS may be confined to scrutinising only universities’ formal, high-level rules, rather than the internal policies through which speech — indeed, campus culture more generally — is managed in practice. As the letter argues, this makes the complaints scheme, alongside strengthened registration conditions and the possibility of financial penalties, more necessary than ever. Due to open in September, the scheme is designed to provide a low-stakes, free-to-use route for individuals to seek redress when their free speech or academic freedom rights are infringed — something the Sussex litigation itself could not deliver, and a far more accessible remedy than the delays and expense of employment tribunal proceedings. Without these provisions, universities face little practical incentive to align their internal policies with their legal duties. With them, there is at least the prospect of a regulatory framework capable of giving those duties real effect. CAF’s message to ministers is clear: the Sussex ruling is not a reason to hesitate, but a reminder of why the new protections are needed, and why they should be implemented in full, without delay.

The High Court has sided with Kathleen Stock’s persecutors. In overturning a fine against Sussex University, it has sent a clear signal: that free speech can be crushed if it conflicts with woke policies. This is a dark day, says Freddie Attenborough buff.ly/tCFYg97

University leaders cannot face the thought of an independent regulatory framework covering their current speaker policies and practice. CAF sets out why their position is so dangerous to academic freedom

“During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister went so far as to call the university a ‘bastion of free speech’. Reader, I laughed.” Kathleen Stock on the rewriting of campus history, and why the Sussex v OfS ruling leaves intact the culture and bureaucracy that chills speech on campus. unherd.com/2026/05/the-re…

A High Court judge has floated the idea that one way for a university to “manage” the risk of a gender-critical lecture would be for administrators to “read it in advance”. The difficulty is what this might look like in practice. Who would carry out the review? Legal counsel? An EDI officer? The chair of the LGBTQ+ Staff Network? On what basis would changes be requested: tone, language, framing — or simply a sense of distaste? Would passages deemed likely to generate upset need to be reformulated, or accompanied by trigger warnings? And what would any of this mean for how the academic delivering such a lecture is regarded by colleagues and students? afcomm.org.uk/2026/05/01/sus…

Any university that asks for a copy of one of my lectures to vet in advance can expect i) refusal ii) publicity iii) legal action.

“In 2021 @akuareindorf KC, reviewing cancellation of one of my own talks at Uni of Essex, found that asking the speaker to submit her talk in advance was unacceptable, & noted the @HumanRightsCtte view that such pre-vetting is not a reasonable condition to impose.”

@ComAcFreedom There is this weird assumption that lectures are scripted in advance. I can't remember when I last did that - improvisation to PowerPoint prompts is much more effective and engaging as a lecture method. I would also do this if guesting and edit a recording if hosts wanted a text

I’ve delivered training to colleagues at Sussex several times in the past couple of years, and I can confirm that Kathleen Stock’s description of a “culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear” remains an accurate reflection of how colleagues there are feeling today. You can see it in their eyes. You can hear it in the slight, but constant, stutter in their voices. The descriptions of the problems staff use are hesitant; more is implied than described. “Some of the student interactions we have are…tricky, particularly in relation to, er, protected characteristics.” “We’ve definitely seen a shift when it comes to students, er, behaving, well, presenting in ways that can be, I guess, challenging.” “We’ve had some problems in recent years, which you’ll probably have heard about.” That kind of thing. Every now and again, you get someone in the group who is a hardcore believer ✊. They’ll be the first to test the waters by telling the room that they are also “mindful of neurodiversity”. And they won’t stutter as terms like “safe space”, “LGBTQ+” and “student voice” dance from their semi-grins. This colleague tends not to give their name on the feedback forms at the end of the training session, but I’ll know them by their comment that “The session tended to frame the student as the problem”, or by the one lonely tick in the “disagree” box under the question about whether or not the trainer was effective. However, the hardcore believers are surprisingly rare. Maybe they self-select out of my training in favour of other types of event. Maybe they don’t think they need training. Or maybe I am getting to work with a representative sample and the believers really are a surprisingly small minority. When they speak, I would generally describe the vibe among their colleagues in the room as tired. This is not just a Sussex problem. Other university campuses are very similar, if sometimes a little less hesitant about naming it. However, it’s a very real problem - and, as this @unherd article sets out, no court appeal ruling on the technical meaning of the term “governing documents” will do anything to change the reality of what it’s like to work in a university today. The planet goes on being round. If I am invited to deliver training on Sussex’s campus again, I know I’ll again walk under that underpass that takes me from the station to the buildings that I always need a map to tell apart. And, just as I’ve done on each recent visit, I’ll imagine it was my name on rows of menacing posters lining that tiled tunnel. I’ll imagine I’m walking to work, knowing that the reactions of my managers, all the way up, are almost certain to range from “I don’t want to get involved” to “You’ve brought this on yourself”, with not an ounce of humanity or liberty on offer. And I’ll know that no salary offer would ever be enough to give up my freedom and rejoin the ranks of the permanent university employee. Sadly, the OfS’ errors of process, probably combined with some overzealous interpretation work from the court, have empowered the people in the sector who deny there’s a free speech problem. This ruling will be spun and it will be misinterpreted as some kind of clean bill of health. But, trust me, if you ever find yourself delivering training to a room full of academics, a court judgment like this will seem very unreal indeed.

@Chris46363650 Thanks Chris. We've turned it into an article here: afcomm.org.uk/2026/04/30/sus…

@ComAcFreedom Are you putting this statement on your web site?

STATEMENT: The High Court’s judgment in R (University of Sussex) v Office for Students has just been handed down, and it represents a serious setback for those concerned with freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus. We’re still working through the detail, but the key points are already clear. At the heart of the ruling are three findings that materially narrow the routes by which the regulator can enforce free-speech protections. First, the court adopts a restrictive interpretation of what counts as a “governing document”. In practice, that means the OfS cannot use its core regulatory condition — Condition E1, which requires universities’ governing documents to uphold free speech and academic freedom — to reach ordinary internal policy frameworks via the “governing documents” route. That matters because EDI policies, harassment codes and reporting systems are often the mechanisms through which lawful but, to some, upsetting speech is regulated on campus. The risk is that a whole layer of policies which, in practice, govern campus culture will now sit beyond the same level of regulatory scrutiny. Second, it resets the meaning of “freedom of speech within the law”. The OfS had treated one of Sussex’s contested policies as problematic because it was capable of capturing lawful speech. The court rejects that approach, holding that the OfS had not properly applied the structured analysis its own guidance requires. Although the regulator accepts that lawful speech may, in some circumstances, be restricted where there are no reasonably practicable steps to secure it and the restriction is justified and proportionate, the court found that it had effectively treated the capture of lawful speech as sufficient to establish a breach. The danger is obvious: the fight over lawful speech will now be pushed into case-by-case balancing exercises, precisely the terrain on which universities have long sought to defend restrictive internal policies. Third, the court gives “academic freedom” a hard-edged but narrow statutory meaning. The relevant legal threshold is whether an academic is placed in jeopardy of losing their job or privileges — not whether they are subjected to investigation, pressure, reputational damage, or a broader chilling effect. On this point too, the OfS’s approach was found to be legally flawed. Yet for academics, the reality is that pressure rarely operates at that level. Instead, it takes softer forms — cancellation, ostracism, exclusion from networks and opportunities, reputational damage — all of which can chill speech long before anyone is formally “in jeopardy” of losing their job. The result is that while the statutory duties to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech remain in place, a gap has opened up between the high-level documents the regulator can scrutinise and the ways speech is managed on campus in practice. We hope the OfS appeals this ruling. Having already stripped students out of the new free-speech complaints scheme, the government has turned the Office for Students into the Office for everyone but students. Now, if this ruling stands and confines the regulator to universities’ formal “governing documents”, while pushing disputes over lawful speech back into case-by-case proportionality tests, the OfS may find its most direct route to the EDI policies and reporting systems through which speech is actually policed cut off — creating the Office for no one at all.

The High Court’s decision in R (University of Sussex) v Office for Students was handed down this week and significantly reshapes the terrain on which #freespeech disputes in universities will be fought. CAF has published an analysis of what the judgment means for academic freedom and the future of the OfS free speech complaints scheme. 👇 afcomm.org.uk/2026/04/30/sus…

The High Court has rewarded Kathleen Stock’s persecutors. Sussex University has inexplicably won the right to trample on free speech and academic freedom. CAF Research Manager, Freddie Attenborough, for @spikedonline. spiked-online.com/2026/04/30/the…

@SarahPedersen2 I actually felt sick reading the judgment and still feel sick thinking about Sussex's VC glee. I would have thought a more careful and measured response to the win would have been far more appropriate given everything that is in the public domain about what happened there!