When Robert Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, young American scientists wanting to work with the world’s best researchers crossed the Atlantic as a matter of course. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer’s choice was between Germany, particularly Göttingen and Leipzig, and England, particularly Cambridge. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that Cambridge didn’t work out for him, so in 1926 he went to work with Max Born, one of the leading figures in quantum mechanics, at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate there just a year later. His timing was good: within a few years from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, attacks on academics, Jewish and otherwise, and then of course the Second World War, had destroyed what was perhaps the world’s most important university system. Let us note that academic structures, depending on relatively small numbers of intellectual leaders, usually able to move elsewhere, are fragile creations.
I used to give a lecture about the role of universities in driving economic development, with particular reference to scientific and technological advances. Part of this lecture covered the role of US universities in supporting national economic progress, starting with the Land Grant Acts (beginning in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War for heaven’s sake!), through which the federal government funded the creation of universities in the new states of the west; going on to examine support for university research in the Second World War, of which the Manhattan Project was only a part; followed by the 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, Science – the endless frontier, which provided the rationale for continued government support for university research. The Cold War was then the context for further large-scale federal funding, not just in science and technology but in social science also, spin-offs from which produced the internet, biotech, Silicon Valley, and a whole range of other advanced industries. So, my lecture concluded, look at what a century-and-a-half of government investment in university-derived knowledge gets you: if not quite a new society, then one changed out of all recognition – and, mostly, for the better.
The currently-ongoing attack by the Trump administration on American universities seems to have overlooked the historical background just sketched out. My “didn’t it work out just fine?” lecture now needs a certain amount of revision: it is almost describing a lost world.
President Trump and his MAGA movement, says Nathan Heller writing in The New Yorker this March, sees American universities as his main enemies in the culture wars on which his political survival depends. Before he became Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance in a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the enemy” set out a plan to “aggressively attack the universities in this country” (New York Times, 3 June 2025). University leaderships seem to have been unprepared for this unprecedented assault, despite ample warning. (A case where Trump and his allies needed to be taken both literally and seriously.) Early 2025 campus pro-Palestinian protests then conveniently handed the Trump administration the casus belli to justify acting against leading universities, further helped by clumsy footwork on the part of university leaderships who seem largely not to have rested their cases on the very high freedom of speech bar set by the First Amendment, meaning that, for example, anti-Semitic speech (naturally, physical attacks would be a different matter) would be lawful under Supreme Court rulings, however much they personally may have deplored it. Instead, university presidents allowed themselves to be presented as apologists for Hamas. (Needless to say, demands that free speech should be protected at all costs does not apply in the Trump/Vance world to speech supporting causes of which they disapprove.)
American universities have never faced a situation remotely like this. As one Harvard law professor quoted in the New Yorker piece remarks, the Trump attacks are about the future of “higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive, or fade away”. If you consider that parallels with Germany in 1933 are far-fetched, please explain why.
SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.
The Office for Students has found that the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement of the University of Sussex involves breach of two of the relevant OfS Regulatory Requirements in late March 2025, and imposed an unprecedentedly substantial fine. The first of those criticised (OfS Condition E1) concerns the duty to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom:
The provider’s governing documents must uphold the public interest governance principles that are applicable to the provider.
A further OfS Condition (E2) requires that ‘the provider must have in place adequate and effective management and governance arrangements’ so as to ‘operate in accordance with its governing documents’.
On 9 April 2025 the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex published a fierce criticism of the unprecedented decision of Office for Students that it had failed to comply with one of its own ‘policies’. The Vice-Chancellor considered that the policy in question was:
a really small statement, of which we have many dozens, if not hundreds, of similar policies and statements. Whereas the governing documents of the university are its charter and statutes and regulations.
There was press coverage about the ensuing uncertainty. UniversitiesUK, as the ‘collective voice’ of universities promised to write to the OfS to ask for clarity as its decision appears to find that it is a ‘failure to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom’ if a university has ‘policies’ to prevent ‘abusive, bullying and harassing’ material or speech.
The University has notified the OfS of its intention to apply for judicial review. Among the grounds Sussex relies on is that the Office for Students did not have powers to treat ‘documents that are not a provider’s “governing documents”’ as creating the public interest governance condition necessary to permit the OfS to seek judicial review. The OfS defines ‘governing documents’ somewhat inadequately as ‘set out in’ its ‘Regulatory Framework’, where ‘the provider’s governing documents must uphold the public interest governance principles that are applicable to the provider. In this case it held:
that the University of Sussex breached ongoing condition of registration E2 because it failed to have adequate and effective management and governance arrangements in place to ensure that it operates in accordance with its governing documents.
The definition of ‘governing documents’ is therefore of the first importance if a precedent is to be set by this OfS decision. The Higher Education and Research Act (2017) s.3(8)(a) protects the autonomy of higher education providers, defining it as ‘the freedom of English higher education providers within the law to conduct their day to day management in an effective and competent way’. Sussex was created among the batch of new universities of the 1960s.
The Act created a new Regulator, the Office for Students, stating that the Regulator ‘must have regard to’ the ‘need to protect the institutional autonomy of English higher education providers’. This requires a fine balance if the OfS is to avoid intrusion upon a provider’s autonomy.
The institutional autonomy of higher education providers gives them control of the drafting of their internal legislation. External authorities may insist on particular points in certain cases. For example medical qualifications set by a provider cannot constitute a qualification to be a doctor unless they are recognised by the General Medical Council. But the right to create its own rules (within the law) largely lies with the provider, who may design them and order them in its own preferred hierarchy. The Office for Students may not interfere.
Nevertheless the creation of ‘governing documents’ must carry certain implications about the source of the internal or external authority to create, review or amend them. It is suggested that ‘Sussex contends that these are matters for our old friend the Visitor, a traditional legal role in UK university governance, who in Sussex’s case is the actual King’, and:
cites longstanding legal authority confirming that the Visitor has exclusive jurisdiction over internal governance questions, including interpretation and application of the university’s own rules, and says that unless Parliament clearly removes or overrides that jurisdiction, external bodies like OfS can’t interfere.
Where the Monarch is not the Visitor it is normally a Bishop.
However a Visitor is not essential to the law-making of a higher education provider. ‘Alternative providers’ may not have Visitors. As eleemosynary bodies their Colleges normally have Visitors of their own but neither Oxford nor Cambridge has a Visitor. Under the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Act of 2023, both Universities create their own Statutes. In Oxford’s case those which are King-in-Council Statutes require the consent of the Privy Council on behalf of the King. In Cambridge all its Statutes require that consent to their creation or modification. Their subordinate legislation, most Regulations in Oxford (some of Oxford’s Regulations may be created by its Council) and Special Ordinances and Ordinances in Cambridge, simply require the consent of their governing bodies, Oxford’s Congregation of over 5000 and Cambridge’s Regent House of over 7000 members.
The rules at the top of a provider’s hierarchies may constitute governing documents but it is far from clear how far down that status applies. For purposes of management ‘procedural or process documents’ explain the required ways of doing things and the processes which must be followed’. Among these are Codes of Practice and ‘Guidance documents’. This seems to be where the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement fits, as approved by the Executive Group in 2018, 2022, 2023 and 2024 and placed under the heading of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion(revised in 2022, 2023 and 2024). Is it a governing document in this lowly position?
Also found relevant by the Office for Students in the Sussex case was the exercise of powers of delegation. It identified ‘a pattern of decisions taken at the university to adopt and/or revise policies without proper delegated authority’, both that its:
Prevent Steering Group approved and adopted the 2021 version of the University’s Freedom of Speech Code of Practice despite not having delegated authority to do so
and also that ‘the 2023 version of the External Speakers Procedure was approved by the University Executive Group, despite that group not having delegated authority to do so’.
Like similar universities Sussex has an Executive Team composed of a Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, their deputies, Deans of Schools and Faculties, with senior academic-related staff headed by a University Secretary, a Financial Officer and various Directors. These are not directly responsible for framing its legislation but may have authority to apply it, though not necessarily powers to delegate its application.
The Office for Students could turn to the University’s rules about delegation in framing its criticism. Sussex has given thought to that. Sussex’s Council approved a Scheme of Delegation in March 2018. ‘Responsibility’ may be delegated by the Council except for the appointment of the Vice-Chancellor and President; ‘the variation, amendment or revocation of the Charter or Statutes’; and responsibility for approving the University’s annual audited accounts or the appointment of Auditors. The Scheme of Delegation clarifies where roles and responsibilities are allocated between Council and its Committees, among Committees, and between Council and Senate. The ‘Executive’ and a University Executive Group are described as exercising ‘leadership’ and there is also a University Leadership Team, though ‘leadership’ is undefined.
Sussex has also given thought to overall responsibilities for supervision of the exercise of its internal rules. It has chosen to describe them collectively as ‘policies’. It isrecognised to be ‘important that a clear and consistent approach is taken to drafting and updating policies across the institution’ details the requirements for the creation, approval, review, and updating of policies. However it clarifies the difference between policies and other associated documents, sets out responsibilities relating to policies, and details the requirements for the creation, approval, review, and updating of policies. An overarching Policy on Policies has been agreed by the ‘University Executive Team and Council’. This consists in a Policy on the Creation and Management of University Policies (‘Policy Framework’).
The aim of the University’s Policy Framework is to make clear what a policy is and what policies should be used for, to differentiate between policies and other types of documents (e.g. procedural documents, codes of practice, etc), and to outline the process that should be followed when drafting, reviewing, and updating policies. An outline of where responsibilities lie in relation to policies is also included.
This suggests that if pressed Sussex might take all these to constitute its ‘governing documents’, while recognising distinctions among them.
Nevertheless Sussex distinguishes governance and management. ‘A policy is a high-level statement of principles, requirements or behaviours that apply broadly across the University’ and ‘reflects institutional values’, thus supporting ‘the delivery of the University’s strategy’. It reflects ‘legal and regulatory obligations, sector standards, or high-level operational requirements’. These create obligations.
Among them Sussex lists ‘Regulations’, which must be made ‘pursuant to the Charter’. These contain detailed rules governing a wide variety of actions of, or on behalf of, the University falling under governance but extending into management: staffing procedures, student disciplinary and appeals procedures, the Students’ Union, the composition of Council and Senate, titles of degrees and Schools, roles of Heads of Schools, lists of collaborative institutions, academic titles and dress, the various degree courses awarded by the University, and general University regulations (library, ICT, administrative). These Regulations are updated annually and approved by Council and/or Senate. Next come written ‘Resolutions’ which Council members may choose to approve or not, ‘in accordance with procedures set out in the Regulations’, though amendments to the Charter and the Statutes and certain Regulations require ‘a three-fourths majority’.
For purposes of management ‘procedural or process documents’ going beyond these categories explain the required ways of doing things at Sussex and ‘the processes which must be followed’. Among these are Codes of Practice and ‘Guidance documents’. This seems to be where the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement fits, as approved by the Executive Group in 2018, revised in 2022, 2023 and 2024. placed under the heading of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Are they still among ‘governing documents’ with a constitutional role in the University’s governance? An application for a judicial review will take a considerable time to produce a recommendation even if it supports Sussex’s argument
SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.
The idea of institutional autonomy in higher education institutions (HEIs) naturally comes up when discussing academic freedom. These two ideas are connected, and the simplest way to define how they relate to one another is that they are intertwined through several procedures and agreements that link people, institutions, the state, and civil society. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy cannot be compared, but they also cannot be separated and the loss of one diminishes the other. Protecting academic freedom and institutional autonomy is viewed by academics as a crucial requirement for a successful HEI. For instance, institutional autonomy and academic freedom are widely acknowledged as essential for the optimization of university operations in most African nations.
How does institutional autonomy influence academic freedom in higher education institutions in Ghana?
In some countries, universities have been subject to government control, with appointments and administrative positions influenced by political interests, leading to violations of academic autonomy and freedom. Autonomy is a crucial element in safeguarding academic freedom, which requires universities to uphold the academic freedom of their community and for the state to respect the right to science of the broader community. Universities offer the necessary space for the exercise of academic freedom, and thus, institutional autonomy is necessary for its preservation. The violation of institutional autonomy undermines not only academic freedom but also the pillars of self-governance, tenure, and individual rights and freedoms of academics and students. Universities should be self-governed by an academic community to uphold academic freedom, which allows for unrestricted advancement of scientific knowledge through critical thinking, without external limitations.
How does corporate governance affect the relationship between institutional autonomy and academic freedom?
Corporate governance mechanisms, such as board diversity, board independence, transparency, and accountability, can ensure that the interests of various stakeholders, including students, faculty, and the government, are represented and balanced. The incorporation of corporate governance into academia introduces a set of values and priorities that can restrict the traditional autonomy and academic freedom that define a self-governing profession. This growing tension has led to concerns about the erosion of academia’s self-governance, with calls for policies that safeguard academic independence and uphold the values of intellectual freedom and collaboration that are foundational to higher education institutions. Nonetheless, promoting efficient corporate governance, higher education institutions can help safeguard academic freedom and institutional autonomy, despite external pressures.
Is there a significant difference between the perceptions of males and females regarding institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and their relationship?
The appointment process for university staff varies across countries, but it is essential that non-academic factors such as gender, ethnicity, or interests do not influence the selection of qualified individuals who are necessary for the institution’s quality. Unfortunately, studies indicate that women are often underrepresented in leadership positions and decision-making processes related to academic freedom and institutional autonomy. This underrepresentation can perpetuate biases and lead to a lack of diversity in decision-making. One solution to address these disparities is to examine gender as a factor of difference to identify areas for improvement and promote gender equality in decision-making processes. By promoting diversity and inclusivity, academic institutions can create a more equitable environment that protects institutional autonomy and promotes academic freedom for everyone, regardless of their gender.
Methodology and Conceptual framework
The quantitative and predictive nature of the investigation necessitated the use of an explanatory research design. Because it enabled the us to establish a clear causal relationship between the exogenous and endogenous latent variables, the explanatory study design was chosen. The simple random sample technique was utilised to collect data from an online survey administered to 128 academicians from chosen Ghanaian universities.
The conceptual framework, explaining the interrelationships among the constructs in the context of the study is presented. The formulation of the conceptual model was influenced by the nature of proposed research questions backed by the supporting theories purported in the context of the study.
Conclusions and Implications
Institutional autonomy significantly predicts academic freedom at a strong level within higher education institutions in Ghana. Corporate governance can restrict academic freedom when its directed to yield immediate financial or marketable benefits but in this study it plays a key role in transmitting the effect of institutional autonomy. Additionally, there is a significant difference in perception between females and males concerning the institutional autonomy – academic freedom predictive relationship. Practically, higher education institutions, particularly in Ghana, should strive to maintain a level of autonomy while also ensuring that academic freedom is respected and protected. This can be achieved through decentralized governance structures that allow for greater participation of academics in decision-making processes. Institutions should actively engage stakeholders, including academics, in discussions and decisions related to institutional autonomy and academic freedom. This will ensure that diverse perspectives are considered in policy development.
Bashiru Mohammed is a final year PhD student at the faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. He also holds Masters in Higher education and students’ affairs from the same university. His research interest includes School management and administration, TVET education and skills development.
Professor Cai Yonghong is a professor at Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. She has published many articles and presided over several domestic and international educational projects and written several government consultant reports. Her research interest includes teacher innovation, teacher expertise, teacher’s salary, and school management.
References
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Zulu, C (2016) ‘Gender equity and equality in higher education leadership: What’s social justice and substantive equality got to do with it?’ A paper presented at the inaugural lecture, North West University, South Africa
The easy way to tell authoritarian (or worse) states from ones that are, broadly speaking, liberal democracies is that in the latter you will find a range of public institutions that are significantly independent of the central state: this is what creates a plural society. It is, when you consider it, pretty surprising that we can have institutions largely funded, one way or another, by taxation, yet not controlled by the state. Take the example of Britain’s national cultural institutions: these are mainly state-funded yet guard their independence fiercely. However, we have seen in recent years how government has tried to drag them – the BBC, several major museums – into ludicrous “culture wars” and seeking to appoint to their governing bodies individuals thought to be sympathetic to certain government agendas. It is a sign that we live in a functioning liberal democracy that government does not routinely get its own way in these struggles: under an authoritarian regime, it would not even be a matter for discussion. Liberal-minded people know, almost instinctively, that independent institutions matter.
Perhaps the most important non-state public institution, everywhere, is the judiciary. The outcomes of legal cases where the state is involved in Russia or China, say, are invariably foregone conclusions. A judge’s task in these situations requires presentational skills rather than forensic ones: to frame the predetermined outcome so that it seems as if legal norms were applied, thus allowing the government to claim that the decision was made by an independent judiciary. That show trials continue in Putin’s Russia and elsewhere (why not just throw dissidents into jail, or indeed execute them?) is an implicit recognition that the moral standing of liberal institutions is too high to be simply ignored.
But those of us fortunate enough to live in liberal societies – being, as the poet Douglas Dunn puts it, “on the pleasant side of history” – cannot be complacent: the institutional structures that we all-too-readily take for granted and which underpin pluralism and support our freedoms are, we have seen recently, desperately fragile. The “enemies of the people” assault on the judiciary by the tabloid press in November 2016 over, bizarrely, a legal determination that parliament needed to vote to trigger the process of leaving the EU, showed how a populist frenzy might be worked up. That the attack was not countered immediately and vigorously by the government, because it suited the government’s political purposes at the time, was deeply shameful and worrying.
In most authoritarian states, universities and colleges do not seem to carry the same weight as the judiciary: they are apparently mostly left to get on with their work in peace, providing, naturally, that they don’t cause trouble for the regime. Academics in the former Soviet bloc countries became expert in knowing how far they could push matters (normally, not very far) and still keep their jobs and privileges. The state was a constant – if to outsiders, hidden – presence in university affairs, and university rectors usually saw their jobs in terms of keeping their academics quiet and the secret police out. The Soviet academic observation that the most dangerous university subject was history – because while we could be certain that the future would be a socialist nirvana, the past was full of traps for the unwary – neatly delineated the scope of university work under authoritarian rule. A recent detailed account of governance in Chinese universities today (Liu, 2023) explains that each university has a Communist Party committee which is “the highest authority within the university”, a point not made, in my experience, when western visitors meet the university president. He or she is accountable to a political structure that outsiders do not usually see (and if they do, its role is glossed-over), and which determines how decisions made in Beijing will be applied within the university.
In Britain, by contrast, the state/university divide was once maintained with almost religious fervour. In the days of the University Grants Committee (UGC) – peak liberalism for higher education – I once found myself chatting over coffee in a conference break to an Education Department civil servant. When he learned that I worked in a university, he almost dropped his coffee cup in shock when he realised that he’d sinned against the arms-length principle that meant that the UGC was supposed to be the only means of contact between universities and government departments. Universities, like local authorities, were seen then as autonomous parts of the public realm, each with their own goals and methods, rather than as agencies delivering central government policies. “The department [for Education and Science] dispensed cheques to the University Grants Committee for the universities and to the local authorities for schools and polytechnics with guidelines sometimes attached but virtually nil powers of enforcement…In the 1980s [under the Thatcher government] all that changed” (Hennessey, 1989: 428).
That change meant that the sharp state/university divide has now largely vanished: the role of the OFS is of course utterly different to that of the UGC. The proposal put forward by the then government in the recent general election campaign (have we heard the last of it?), that there would be central direction on which degree courses universities would be allowed to offer – or, in the measured tones of the Department for Education press release, “Crackdown on rip-off university degrees” – would mean that universities should be considered for all practical purposes as central government agencies, just as in China.
Why does this matter? One not-insignificant reason is about effectiveness: largely autonomous institutions – self-governing universities, locally-elected councils, free trade unions, the Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners – responding variously to the needs of the groups they are aiming to serve will almost certainly lead to better outcomes than would be produced by a remote, centrally-directed operation. But the larger reason is that pluralism underpins the freedoms we value in liberal societies, creating the distributed decision-making which you and I might have a chance of influencing. When those decisions are not ones that central government finds to its taste, it is even more important that independent thinking might prevail. The regular attacks on universities by Ministers in the last government, as regularly chronicled in SRHE News, surely had the purpose of undermining autonomous institutions with a commitment to disinterested knowledge production, and so weakening a core element of a liberal society. If this isn’t a fight worth having, I don’t know what is.
Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.
References
Hennessy, P (1989) Whitehall London: Secker and Warburg
Liu, X (2023) The Development and Governance of Private Universities in China Singapore: Springer Nature
SRHE News typically contains a round-up of recent academic events and conferences, policy developments and new publications, written by editor Rob Cuthbert. To illustrate the contents, here is part of the April 2021 issue which covers Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech.
A global academic freedom index
The Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), an independent non-profit think tank based in Berlin, has published a report on academic freedom globally, arguing for it to be used to moderate global university rankings. Authors Katrin Kinzelbach, Ilyas Saliba, Janika Spannagel and Robert Quinn have shown all their working and include this map:
“The AFi 2020 includes scores for 175 countries and territories. In this map, the states’ AFi scores are grouped in ranges, with A representing those countries with the highest levels of academic freedom (green on the map) and E representing those with the lowest academic freedom scores (red on the map).”
Free speech in the US
A free speech case on campus reached the US Supreme Court on 8 March 2020, which decided in favour of the student. Chike Uzuegbunam, a former student at Georgia Gwinnett College, had tried while a student to hand out pamphlets sharing his religious views with fellow students. He was stopped twice by campus police, first to be told he could only do that in a designated ‘free speech zone’. When he tried with official permission to do so, he was prevented because other students had objected. The College eventually rescinded its policy on ‘free speech zones’ but the case went to the Supreme Court to prevent it becoming moot, that is not cited as a precedent, since Uzuegbunam had graduated. The Court ruled that he was nevertheless entitled to nominal damages of $1, which was what he had sought. Elizabeth Redden told the story for insidehighered.com on 9 March 2021.
Is debate under threat on UK campuses?
Jim Dickinson asked the question in his Wonkhe blog on 20 January 2021. Unlike the culture warriors, he referred to a lot of evidence suggesting the answer is not what most people are encouraged to think. He pointed out that outgoing OfS chair Michael Barber, about to give a speech on this, was actually sitting on a lot of relevant evidence, held but not published by the OfS, which would give the lie to the current narrative. MP David Davis introduced a private member’s Bill in the House of Commons on 21 January 2021 because, according to David Williamson in the Daily Express on 17 January 2021, he “wants to stop “cancel culture” taking root in centres of higher education and is alarmed at resistance to hearing “uncomfortable opinions”.” Well, no doubt no-one had thought to legislate on that since the 1980s, but there is quite a lot of advice and guidance about.
Our radical student-led proposals will secure and champion campus free speech
There was a well-argued blog from three SU Presidents – Patrick O’Donnell (York), Lizzie Rodulson (Surrey) and Kwame Asamoah Kwarteng (Manchester) – for Wonkhe on 1 February 2021: “our new report recommends the creation of a code for students’ unions which establishes and reinforces important principles on campus of political diversity and freedom of expression. We propose to substantially adopt widely used principles within the free speech policy statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago to send a clear signal – that our campuses and unions are open for debate.” The NUS VP for HE, Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, and two more SU presidents – Sunday Blake (Exeter) and Meg Price (Worcester) – followed up on WonkHE on the same day with an equally persuasive piece saying that the real free speech problem was the imbalance between the proportion of high-profile speakers visiting Russell Group universities rather than others: “we’d like to see a new focus – where universities, sector agencies and the government work together with students’ unions, guilds and associations in all types of university to attract speakers, put on events, generate debate and expose students to new ideas, thinking, policy and people.”
How should the OfS regulate the exercise of academic freedom?
Gavin Williamson announced his free speech initiative with a column in The Telegraph, where else, on 16 February 2021: ‘Turning the tide on cancel culture will start with universities respecting free thought’. Williamson wrote to all universities on 16 February 2021: “The current legal framework imposes on those concerned in the governance of providers a legal duty to take reasonably practicable steps to ensure free speech within the law is secured … A growing number of reports of concerns in relation to freedom of speech on campus, however, suggest that this duty is not being fully complied with …”. The White Paper, running to no less than 42 pages, was published on 17 February 2021.
Evan Smith (Flinders) blogged for HEPI on 16 February 2021 about the history of previous such initiatives. The popular opinion was probably that articulated by Mick Fletcher (independent) in West Country Bylines on 15 February 2021: “You could hardly make it up. At the same time as government plans to appoint a ‘free speech tsar’ to stop students cancelling controversial speakers it also intends to summon heritage groups to be told by a minister what they can and cannot say about British history. It’s ludicrous but at the same time deeply sinister.” Andrew Whiting (Birmingham City) reported on his research into the Prevent Duty placed on universities, on the LSE Impact Blog on 16 February 2021, which raises “serious questions about necessity and proportionality”.
Smita Jamdar, Head of Education at Shakespeare Martineau, offered guidance on the Secretary of State’s guidance to OfS on 11 February 2021: “this is in our view bad guidance: bad because of the very great problems entailed in implementing it and bad because producing guidance that cannot really be implemented and so must ultimately be withdrawn or modified undermines public trust and confidence in the authority of the office of Secretary of State. … upholding academic freedom is already part of the public interest governance principles and so where there is evidence of a provider’s governing body failing to take appropriate steps, the OfS could treat that as a breach of the registration conditions relating to management and governance. However, that is very different to adjudicating on individual cases and disputes in the way that the Secretary of State appears to want. Finally, it is notable and alarming to recall that when the institutional autonomy provisions were introduced by way of amendment into HERA, they were designed to protect institutions from excessive interference by politicians and regulators. Interestingly they are being used here, on the curious and questionable basis that the government believes institutions need protection from their own autonomy, to justify a potentially significant erosion of autonomy by those very politicians and regulators.”
Hugo Rifkind of The Times was also unconvinced, in his 16 February 2021 tweets: “Williamson’s free speech thing is a mess … if you’re saying unis must preserve challenging speech while also being against re-examining history while ALSO having insisted only 3m ago that all unis adopt the IHRA definition on antisemitism, then I think you need to be quite deft on your feet in explaining wtf is going on and what exactly you think about everything, with reference to what everybody else does, too.” Political commentator Ian Dunt blogged for politics.co.uk on 17 February 2021 that the proposals were ‘a Trojan horse for authoritarianism’: “The problems with the plans are as follows: They are cynical, nonsensical, internally contradictory, functionally implausible and work to perpetuate the exact phenomenon which they claim to undermine.” LSE student Jason S Reed wrote in The Independent on 16 February 2021 ‘The government’s obsession with provoking culture wars is embarrassing – and I say that as a Tory student’. However Arif Ahmed (Cambridge), blogging for HEPI on 17 February 2021, gave a measured welcome: “So these proposals give valuable support to principles that everyone ought to defend. Of course in practice everything will depend on whether the regulator will use these powers impartially and with vigour. But that is true when the state gives any powers to an independent regulator of anything. Still, it is clear to me that in this case doing so addresses a real problem, and does it in more or less the right way.”
There were constructive comments from Alison Scott-Baumann (SoAS) in The Guardianon 17 February 2021: “In Freedom of Speech in Universities: Islam, Charities and Counter-Terrorism, my book with Simon Perfect, I recommend two simple principles for building what we call a “community of inquiry” – a space where difficult issues can be discussed. First it’s necessary to accept bravely the need to debate and disagree upon matters of urgent importance to young people. Difficult, even intractable, issues such as climate change, environmental disasters, migration, race, gender and identity and a failed economic model need to be discussed. But they are dynamite. So, secondly, in order to defuse potential flash points, we recommend adoption of “procedural values” – by which I mean an etiquette of argument that we all say we adhere to but rarely do: active listening, distinguishing between the person and their arguments, and settling upon some sort of outcome that can be achieved in the real world. These need to be agreed upon, with the backing of university authorities and union representatives, and closely monitored. There needs to be a general compact that, in any forum designated as a “community of inquiry”, these procedures apply – and that people will not be targeted outside them for what they say inside, so long as they have also observed the same principles.”
Jack Harvey (Coventry University SU) had perhaps the most thoughtful piece of all, for WonkHE on 19 February 2021, analysing the nuances of respect and tolerance for other people’s views. Bahram Bekhradnia, HEPI President, made a welcome return to the fray with his HEPI blog on 18 March, in coruscating form: “This is a rushed and unnecessary White Paper, intellectually flimsy, badly thought out and poorly argued with little evidence to support its conclusions. It is full of typos … its inconsistent – Anglo-American – spelling betrays the influence on its thinking, if not its drafting, of the American far right. … if indeed there is a nut to be cracked, it certainly does not need this sledgehammer with which to crack it.”
After Michele Donelan’s article in The Sunday Telegraph on 28 February 2021, Jim Dickinson of WonkHE was at the end of his tether on 28 February 2021, and SRHE member Julian Crockford had clearly lost all patience in his WonkHE blog on 1 March 2021. Jonathan Simons of Public First tweeted: “Front page of the Tel: universities are censoring history by only telling a partial story. Later in the Tel: the National Trust should be investigated because it wants to tell the whole story of history. Pick a ******** lane, guys”. Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian on 27 February gave chapter and verse on the ‘research’ that Gavin Williamson had relied on for his policy paper, and Policy Exchange suffered further damage when its retrospective and would-be secret corrections were exposed. The Policy Exchange paper had conducted a survey based on the alleged ‘no-platforming’ of Germaine Greer – who had in fact spoken at an event organised at Cardiff University, a fact ignored in the original but retrospectively corrected by a new footnote after the original had been cited in the government policy paper. Adam Bychawski wrote for OpenDemocracy on 19 February 2021 that: “British government proposals for strengthening free speech at universities cite an American anti-LGBT ‘hate group’ and a British ‘dark money’-funded think tank that has recommended no-platforming Extinction Rebellion.”
David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson interpreted the policy paper as a complete breakdown of trust and confidence by politicians in the HE sector, in their 16 February 2021 blog for WonkHE.
Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, emeritus professor of higher education management, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of SRHE. He is an independent academic consultant whose previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China. He is current chair of the SRHE Publications Committee.
My main concern in this post is about academic freedom, free speech and surveillance. I write as one who worked on Open University courses in the 1980s (under a previous Conservative administration) which were investigated for alleged Marxist bias.
Bahram Bekhradnia, in a recent HEPI blog, has identified the small number of complaints about free speech on campus which have provoked a government response, and the ideological base of those making them. The same was true in my experience – single figure numbers of complaints about courses with 5,000 students a year in some cases and many more thousands of ‘drop-in’ viewers and listeners for OU/BBC programmes. The allegations were found to be unjustified, but led to significantly increased levels of internal monitoring and accountability. The BBC staff were very scared of possible government sanctions.
For one radio programme, Rosemary Deem, an SRHE notable, was barred from contributing because she was, as I then was, a member of the Labour party. Two was too many. I was forced to accept a distasteful right-winger, who insisted that his contribution – denying Tory cuts to education budgets – could not be criticised, questioned, commented upon, nor edited. The new rules said that all elements of a course had to be internally balanced – not one programme putting one point of view and a second with another. Ditto for course units. The monitoring group said the programme was biased, lacked balance, and should not be broadcast. I said that students were intelligent enough to recognise his ‘pedigree’ and it went out.
In 1988, another programme, on the Great Education Reform Bill, was broadcast at 2am. We arrived later that morning to a phone message from DES demanding a right of reply. The programme had featured John Tomlinson’s comments/critique. He was the Chief Education Officer of Cheshire, hardly a hotbed of revolution. We pointed out that DES staff had been sitting in our ‘classroom’ and that comments could be made to their tutor, discussed with fellow students in self-help groups, and used, if evidenced, in assessments.
My concern is that, as someone who writes on policy and its impact, my work can be seen as ‘disruptive’ [a basic element of much research and education] and ‘causing discomfort and inconvenience’ to some people – mainly policy makers. Those terms are from the current draft bill on police, crime, sentencing and courts, which aims to limit public demonstrations of dissent. Given trends in other countries, and government resistance to a more balanced view of history, I wonder how long it will be before there is more overt intrusion – by OfS? – into controlling the curriculum and suppressing challenging, but legitimate views. In the OU, Marxist critique disappeared for years, as self-censorship operated to avoid recurrent problems of justification. It could happen again.
That goes alongside recent developments with Microsoft surveillance which are intrusive and irritating. The university has just had an ‘upgrade’. In my experience, such upgrades, like restructuring, rarely improve things, and often do the opposite. I now get daily emails from Cortana, a Microsoft offshoot, saying things like ‘Two days ago you were asked a question by X. Have you replied?’ The answer is that ‘if you are reading my emails, you will know the answer to that question’. Undeterred, this AI avatar offers me advice on how to organise my coming week, blithely ignorant that I have only a 0.2 contract. When it says I have 85% of my time ‘spare’, that implies that of my 20% load, only 5% that week was not observable. Its daily plan for me is to spend 2 hours in the morning, ‘focus time…to get your work done’.
The rest is spent not getting my work done, but on email and chats, taking a break and lunchtime and two hours to learn a new skill and develop my career. Wow! Do those in charge of the balanced academic workload know about this prescription? It also believes that all emails are ‘developing your network … you added 23 new members to your networks last week’. A computer network must be much less demanding than my criteria require for the term. Its autonomous, unaccountable and unexplained treatment of my emails includes frequently deleting when I click to open one, and designating as ‘junk’ PDF journal articles relevant to my work sent by Academia. I then have to spend time digging around to find both of these. It also merges emails into a stream so that finding one of them needs a memory of the last one in the stream – often an automatic reply. More time spent digging around.
Then there are the constant disruptive phone calls to verify my sign in. The automated voice advises me that ‘if you have not initiated this verification, you should press such-and-such a key’. I did that, twice, once when two such calls came within 50 seconds of one another, which I thought suspicious. How simple minded I was! The ‘solution’ was to bar me from access until the systems administrators had sorted things. That meant a full day or more in each case. The two most recent calls even came when I had not moved to laptop based work, and I now no longer log out, so I do not sign in, but leave the machine on all day every day which may not be good ecologically, but it helps my mental health and state of mind.
I accept the need for computer security, with university generated messages warning about emails from sources outside the university, such as OfS, AdvanceHE, or HEPI and Research Professional through a university subscription, asking if I trust them. Up to a point, Lord Copper. But balance is the key. I knew there was surveillance – in a previous institution a NATFHE e-mail was held up to allow management to get its reply in simultaneously with its being sent. This, though, is blatant and overt. I suppose that is better than it being hidden, but it is neither efficient nor effective. Am I the only one experiencing this, a human being balancing Marvin, the paranoid android, or do others have similar experiences? If the latter, what are we going to do about it? It has implications for research in terms of the confidentiality of email interviews, for example.
And, finally, on a lighter note … my local optician has a poster in the window advertising ‘Myopia Management’. That sounds like a module to include in the leadership programmes that some of us run.
SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich.
The Annual Conference of the Centre for Global Higher Education on 11 April was enough to reassure anyone that research into HE is in rude health. With a globally diverse audience of 250 or more at the UCL Institute of Education to talk about The new geopolitics of higher education, it was time well spent. Continue reading →
