The Financial Times on Sussex and Stock and all that:

An English university is set to be fined a record £585,000 over allegations it failed to uphold free speech and academic freedom, in a landmark ruling in the debate over student rights on campus.

England’s higher education regulator found “significant and serious breaches” of free speech and governance issues at the University of Sussex, according to a draft press release seen by the Financial Times.

The Office for Students press release, to be published on Wednesday, said a policy intended to prevent abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus had created “a chilling effect” that might cause staff and students to “self-censor”.

Well that’s the thing, isn’t it – that “certain groups” bit. The policy was there to prevent what the university considered abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus and not others. It was there to protect people who claimed to be the sex they weren’t, and not people who realize it’s impossible to be the sex you aren’t. Very definitely not those people: those people were framed as the aggressors, never the aggressed.

The OfS report marks the end of an inquiry that began more than three years ago. It was spawned by the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who said she was forced out of the university in 2021 by a three-year campaign of bullying and character assassination.

For why? For because she’s aware that sex is not like a coat you can put on and take off. For because she realizes that sex is determined in utero and can’t be swapped because we decide we don’t like ours and want that other one instead.

Sussex, ranked joint 26th out of 104 UK institutions in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024, has reacted furiously to the OfS fine.

Sasha Roseneil, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the regulator had decreed “free speech absolutism as the fundamental principle” for universities.

Roseneil claimed the regulator had “refused to speak to us” and that the fine imposed was “wholly disproportionate”. She said the university had defended Stock’s right to pursue her academic work and express her “lawful beliefs”.

No it didn’t. It may have uttered pious banalities, but it didn’t stop the students bullying her.

She added that the ruling made it now “virtually impossible for universities to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying, to protect groups subject to harmful propaganda, or to determine that stereotyped assumptions should not be relied upon in the university curriculum”.

Wtf is that supposed to mean? That universities ought to be free to tell academics they can’t say men are not women because that’s a “stereotyped assumption”? That is what it’s supposed to mean, right? From a university vice-chancellor?

Not quick learners, are they.