This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Is there any more unbecoming way for an adult to respond to a telling-off than “it’s not fair”? That was the main reaction of the University of Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, to the record fine of £585,000 levied on her institution by the Office for Students for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Sussex was just one university among many “navigating contested issues”, Roseneil said, but was “explicitly and deliberately being made an example to other universities”. She might as well have added a stamp of her foot and a wail of “everyone else was doing it too”.
The fine was the culmination of a years’-long investigation by the OfS into campus culture at Sussex in response to the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who writes and speaks about the clash between women’s rights and trans ideology. A campaign of harassment and bullying had led Stock to step down in 2021, citing constructive dismissal.
The university had always defended her speech, Roseneil claimed, but the OfS ruled that its policies, in particular one requiring trans and non-binary identities to be praised in teaching materials, had hampered the expression of lawful beliefs. Sussex plans to appeal the penalty.
◉ ◉ ◉
The episode revealed two fundamental misconceptions apparently held by senior managers at Sussex: that harassing an academic with legal but unfashionable beliefs constituted free speech, while policies that genuinely promote free speech, such as maintaining institutional neutrality on contested subjects and ensuring bullies can’t shut down events or terrorise free-thinking academics, constituted harm to supposedly marginalised communities.
These misconceptions are ubiquitous in universities. The trans and non-binary policy cited in the OfS’s ruling was based on a template from Advance HE, a membership organisation that claims to promote “excellence in higher education”. It has been widely copied across the sector.
Senior management should have treated the Sussex protests as a teachable moment
But universal guilt cannot be allowed to confer universal impunity. Though it may be bad luck for Sussex to have become the object lesson, winning higher education back for free speech and academic freedom has to start somewhere.
Far from being a mitigating factor that the policy didn’t originate with Sussex, as Roseneil seems to think, it’s an indictment of both her and her predecessor who held the post during the Stock affair.
What organisations such as Advance HE sell is power without responsibility. Vice-chancellors can draw their hefty salaries (£342,000 annually in Roseneil’s case) while outsourcing difficult decisions and brushing off any complaint by saying, in effect, that it is below their pay grade. The result is that the buck stops nowhere.
◉ ◉ ◉
Universities are not the only organisations passing off decision-making to industry bodies, campaign groups and quasi-regulators that have turned the promise that you can hold the top job while avoiding accountability into a revenue stream. With names like the National Police Chiefs’ Council (the members are chief constables), the NHS Confederation (hospital trusts) and ukactive (gyms), their business model is to offer training, model policies, award schemes and kitemarks they claim are based on “best practice”.
Some of what they produce may be informative and insightful. But their output on my specialist subject definitely isn’t. Respectively, these organisations tell their members that biologically male police officers with gender recognition certificates should be allowed to strip-search women; that female patients may be committing discrimination if they don’t regard male doctors who claim to be women as literally women; and that gyms should allow men who identify as women to use the women’s changing rooms.
Like Advance HE, these organisations have placed the demands of the trans lobby ahead of everyone else’s legal rights. If you point this out, they say their members are free to ignore their advice. But that is not what those members think is the deal. They signed up to be advised, after all, and it feels risky to go against “best practice”.
The end result is a shell game. Wherever you look, the responsibility for propagating ideological and sometimes outright unlawful positions throughout entire sectors is elsewhere.
◉ ◉ ◉
This generalised abdication of responsibility is generally alarming, but most so in universities, since they are where almost all the young people who will one day become institutional leaders launch into adulthood. When the adults they are supposed to be learning from act like petulant teenagers, actual teenagers are cheated out of role models. And when those adults stop expecting excellence and start rewarding bad behaviour, they teach their charges to be bullies and cheat them out of formative experiences.
Often, those adults seem to think that they are doing students a favour. University senior managers now aim to convert their institutions into “safe spaces”, rather than bracing environments where even difficult ideas can be discussed fearlessly.
When I was preparing to speak at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge in 2022, LGBT student reps claimed allowing the event to go ahead was “potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way”. Rather than reminding them that Cambridge isn’t a creche and they aren’t toddlers, the college master agreed that my presence would interfere with making Caius an “inclusive, diverse and welcoming home”.
Those trying to drive Stock out of Sussex were mostly students, and senior management should have treated their protests as a teachable moment. Instead, the response tacitly framed totalitarian slogans and emotional incontinence as on a par with serious academic endeavour.
◉ ◉ ◉
The pandering and promises of emotional safety are in part an adaptation to undergraduates whose childhood was spent in a school system that encouraged them to obsess about their special identities and to think of themselves as mentally and emotionally fragile.
More than half of university and college students in the UK now claim to suffer from a mental health issue, often something nebulous such as ADHD, OCD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety or depression. A quarter say they have been formally diagnosed. A fifth are registered with their institution as disabled — twice the share a decade ago.
Such registration generally unlocks an “individual support plan” that grants accommodations such as extra time in exams, extended coursework deadlines and exemptions from presenting their work to their peers or being called on in class. But once more than a handful of students have been given them, it’s impractical not to grant them to everyone.
How to remember which students cannot be called on? Why set essays when a quarter of the class must be given extra time? And how can the university manage closed-book exams if more than a handful of candidates are entitled to extra time or separate rooms with fewer distractions? Accommodating this fragile minority ends up denying all students the chance to learn from coping with everyday minor challenges and increases fragility in everyone.
◉ ◉ ◉
And now graduates are turning up in workplaces lacking resilience and expecting their colleagues to be riveted by their special identities. To humour them, employers sponsor “affinity groups” for people with minority sexualities, gender identities and ethnicities, and for mental health conditions snazzily relabelled as neurodiversity.
In recent years they have scattered the calendar with quasi-religious observances such as Trans Day of Remembrance, International Asexuality Day and LGBT History month. They take knees, display the Progress Pride flag and denounce Trump.
Thankfully, a backlash is building. The promise that “diversity, equity and inclusion” would improve profits turned out to be false and many companies are getting rid of the chief diversity officers they hired to virtue-signal after the murder of George Floyd. Trade wars and shooting wars mean business leaders have bigger things to worry about than indulging immature young adults.
Even more encouragingly, the most independent-minded members of the rising generation know they have been cheated. Those who have been bullied with impunity by peers and even their lecturers for expressing ordinary but unfashionable beliefs have learned that promises of diversity, inclusion and kindness come with caveats.
They despise the adults who have palmed them off with this mixture of head-patting condescension and Dolores Umbridge-style nastiness. And they know that if anyone is to take responsibility for fixing things, it will have to be them — for all that that’s really not fair.
