A win for academic freedom of speech

“The Office for Students (OfS) has fined the University of Sussex £585,000 after an investigation found the university’s governing documents failed to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom, as well as failings in the university’s management and governance processes.

The OfS launched its investigation following protests calling for the dismissal of Professor Kathleen Stock, a senior academic at the university. She had teaching and research interests relating to sex, gender, and the rights of individuals in connection to these. The OfS has seen no evidence to suggest that Professor Stock’s speech during her employment at the university was unlawful.”   Read in full here.

Kathleen Stock was a senior academic in the Philosophy department of the University of Sussex who was hounded out of her job by a combination of aggressive protests by students and a lack of support from the University.

She says “I tried hard to raise the alarm to colleagues about the effects of trans policies on free expression, long before large fines on offending institutions were ever in the offing. I published letters in national newspapers, and gathered anonymous testimonies from colleagues across the country about how, in practice, academic freedom on sex and gender was being chilled.”

Unfortunately a local Green Party seemed to condone the campaign against Kathleen Stock and in January 2022 selected Tom Pashby to be a candidate in the upcoming local elections. Pashby was a vocal supporter of the harrassment campaign that he claimed was against ‘institutional transphobia’. The OfS report makes it very clear this was not the case.

“The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to ‘positively represent trans people’ and an assertion that ‘transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated’ could lead staff and students to ‘self-censor’.”
The University of Sussex has learned nothing from the Kathleen Stock debacle

Sadly it seems that Sian Berry, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, has also failed to understand. Here she is speaking in the House of Commons where she described the OfS investigation as “flawed and wasteful” and the fine as “disproportionate”. The replies to her Tweet are worth reading and we hope that Sian has done so and maybe reconsidered her position.

But as Nigel Jones asks in the Spectator “Could this mark a turning point in the culture wars surrounding the corruption of our institutions of higher learning, pressured by trans activists to put their emotions and feelings above biological truth?”