Sussex owes a LOT of money
Big news!
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 policies 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”.
It didn’t help that “abuse” and “harassment” were defined so broadly in one sense and so narrowly in another. Anything short of passionate agreement that Joe is now Josephina is abuse & harassment, while promising to beat up or rape or silence women who know men are not women is just obvious simple justice. Naturally people self-censor.
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.
Like lots of us, I’m familiar with the bullying and character assassination approach, albeit on a much smaller and less important scale.
The ruling by the OfS, which was established in 2017, will send a strong message to higher education institutions trying to balance the prevention of “hate speech” on campus and the defence of free speech.
The university, ranked joint 26th out of 104 UK institutions in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024, has reacted furiously. 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”.
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”.
And yet what did Sussex University do to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying of Kathleen Stock? And by “stereotyped assumptions” does she mean the “assumption” that men are not women and women are not men? Because if she does, she’s arguing for nonsensical assumptions to be relied on in the university curriculum.
Excellent, in many ways, if not in some.
Yes. All that. But think of the living experience this will give to Mediaeval Studies students.! They will be able to step back to circa 1200 AD.! Would-be students from all over the world will be begging to be enrolled.
We really need a better way to penalise some behaviours. A half million quid fine is half a million that is denied to student education, facilities, etc. Meanwhile, those who caused this loss still sit on their gilded thrones to lick their well paid wounds while deciding who to go after next.
It appears that the VC and her minions have escaped any form of punishment except mild embarrassment.
The University, as an inanimate object, did not harass or bully Dr Stock; those who were employed to run it did, and those are the ones who should be paying the fine. It is well past time to end this fiction of corporate personhood and actual persons to account.