A step forward for academic freedom

The government has finally announced a timetable for introducing the Office for Students’ free speech complaints scheme, bringing to an end nearly two years of wholly unnecessary delay during which too many academics whose rights may well have been breached have been left in legal and institutional limbo.

This is long overdue but a welcome step forward nonetheless.

To understand why, it’s worth recalling that, on paper at least, universities have long been under a duty to uphold free speech. Section 43 of the Education Act 1986 imposed such a duty decades ago. But it was never taken especially seriously by much of the sector, largely because it lacked any real enforcement mechanism. This is precisely what the new complaints scheme supplies, giving the regulatory regime established by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 its teeth.

And they are pretty sharp — if not quite in the Cerberus league of underworld guardians envisaged by the legislation as originally drafted, then nonetheless keen enough to nip at the trouser seat of the odd errant vice-chancellor. If implemented as planned this autumn, the scheme will, for the first time, create a free, regulator-backed route by which academics, visiting speakers and other non-student members of a university can challenge restrictions that breach their rights to free speech and academic freedom. The regulator will then be able to investigate those complaints and recommend remedies, including requiring universities to review decisions, pay compensation, or change their internal processes.

Just as importantly, from April 2027 the wider regulatory framework will also place a far more serious constraint on university decision-makers’ tendency to let vague and legally questionable understandings of “hate speech” and “harassment” encroach on lawful free speech. Universities that breach their duties under the 2023 Act will face the possibility of substantial financial penalties: either £500,000 or 2 per cent of their income, whichever is higher. In the most serious cases, the consequences could extend to deregistration, with all that implies for the loss of public grant funding and access to student-support arrangements.

This dry, technocratic-sounding scheme has the potential to change the culture on campuses up and down the country

We have, by now, become wearily familiar with many of the more obvious potential breaches that will come before the OfS: the cancellation of “controversial” speakers, the use of expansive speech codes, and complaints processes in which the disciplinary procedure itself becomes the punishment. But, as the Committee for Academic Freedom’s casework consistently shows, many are more subtle and, in some ways, more insidious: the growing use of political litmus tests in recruitment and promotion, top-down interventions into teaching and curriculum design, the shaping of research funding priorities along ideological lines, and the chilling effect created by anonymous speech-reporting systems. Either way, from next semester there will at last be a specialist route by which such cases can be brought before the regulator.

In that sense, it is no exaggeration to say that this dry, technocratic-sounding scheme has the potential to change the culture on campuses up and down the country, pushing back against an environment in which, too often, administrators have treated speech-restrictive EDI, decolonisation and Net Zero policies, training, and even curriculum interventions as if they were an inevitable extension of equality law. They are not, and senior leadership teams may now find themselves told so rather more often — not just by campaign groups, but in formal regulatory correspondence requiring decisions to be revisited and, where appropriate, compensation to be paid by a certain date, kind regards, the OfS.

Put simply, universities will no longer be able to assume that free speech breaches are a matter of mild administrative inconvenience, and, in any case, a price worth paying to shield supposedly vulnerable groups from ideas that, while perfectly lawful, tend to upset them or, worse, require them to test their ideological assumptions in open debate.

Not that it should have taken this long to get here. The legislation, as originally enacted, rested on two principal enforcement mechanisms: a statutory tort, which would have enabled academics to bring claims in the County Court, and a specialist complaints scheme operated by the OfS.

Yet one of the first things Bridget Phillipson did on taking office in July 2024 was to pause commencement of the remaining provisions of the Act. Then, in January 2025, the government confirmed that the statutory tort would not be brought into force after all, while insisting that a revised complaints scheme would follow once the necessary legislative changes had been made.

By the time the main free-speech duties finally commenced on 1 August 2025, however, the complaints scheme still had not been enacted. The government was, apparently, considering its options. New Year came and went. It needed more time. A suitable “legislative vehicle” had not yet been identified. The dog had eaten their homework. The result was a strangely hollowed-out settlement: universities were subject, in principle, to new statutory duties, but staff and visiting speakers still had no practical mechanism by which to enforce them.

Ministers attempted to justify their inaction by pointing to judicial review and employment tribunals as supposedly available routes of redress. But neither comes close to providing what the legislation had originally promised. Judicial review is a remedy of last resort: narrow in scope, procedurally demanding and prohibitively expensive. Employment tribunals, meanwhile, have no jurisdiction to enforce the free-speech duties imposed by the 2023 Act as such and, as the recent case of former Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas illustrates, do not readily accommodate the specificities of academic freedom.

In the meantime, the consequences of this lacuna have been real enough on campus.

Take the case of Peter Pormann, a specialist in the history of language, who was suspended after using the n-word in a disciplinary meeting while defending a colleague’s context-specific use of language. During the meeting, which had been convened after another academic was accused of upsetting students by using the word “bitch”, Pormann observed that words have context, and that even the word “bitch” can carry a positive meaning if one consults the Oxford English Dictionary. He then used the n-word as a further example of how meaning can shift over time. Following this exposition from an academic well versed in the contextual specificities of language, administrators launched an investigation into whether his remarks were “inappropriate, offensive and racist”. As part of that process, Pormann was suspended, barred from campus, and described to staff as a “potential risk to colleagues”.

Then there’s Professor David Gordon at Bristol, who dared to invite the gender-critical UCL sociologist Alice Sullivan to speak about data — specifically, how public bodies record sex and gender — and remains suspended well over a year later. His offence? Sending a routine email to the university’s LGBTQ+ staff network in response to complaints about the threat of supposedly “harmful” gender-critical speech on campus. Among other things, members of that network had said of Sullivan that she “has been noted for her transphobia [sic] views” and that “this kind of speaker and event… sends a message to trans students and staff that their safety is secondary”.

Or take Laura Murphy at Sheffield Hallam, where research into human-rights abuses in China was formally halted and her research group’s website taken down after pressure linked to the Chinese Communist Party. What we know for sure is that, among the material she later obtained from Hallam via a Subject Access Request, were documents which, as she put it, showed that university officials had “negotiated directly with a foreign intelligence service to trade my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market”.

There are plenty more examples where those came from, all of them underlining just how important this complaints scheme will be. For the individual complainant, it offers the prospect of a remedy that is specialist, external, free to use, and capable of actually, you know, doing something on their behalf. For the sector as a whole, it introduces the prospect of a regulator that will, over time, build up a body of practical precedent to guide institutional decision-making in advance. In that sense, the scheme was never meant merely to resolve disputes after the event, but to alter institutional incentives before those disputes ever arise.

It has, of course, long been open to academics to raise concerns internally, to challenge poor decisions, to write to senior leaders, and to point institutions towards the relevant statutory duties and regulatory guidance. But it is difficult to overstate the chilling effect of what is, in practice, often a form of whistleblowing, undertaken in the absence of any credible external enforcement mechanism.

To speak up in such circumstances is not simply to raise one’s head above the parapet and risk professional detriment. It is to do so in the knowledge that, if the institution refuses to act, there may in practice be nowhere affordable, specialist or timely to go next, and that, once you have spoken up, you must return to the same professional milieu: the same department, the same committee meetings, the same staff room, with the same performative declarations of orthodoxy; the same colleague who reported you for “hate speech” initiating that eight-month disciplinary investigation; the same lectures, with the same students who flagged your teaching materials for “Islamophobia” and prompted management to take the module off you “as a precaution”; the same preferred-pronoun circles; the same anti-racism pledges; the same #bekind badge on the same rainbow lanyard around that same line manager’s neck — and all of them knowing, if not already then soon, how you complained, how nothing came of it, and how that just goes to show exactly the kind of bigot you so truly are.

Let us hope that, from this autumn, this begins to change. There is, after all, very little more conducive to academic freedom, and to the robust debate and disagreement that follow in its wake, than an environment in which university decision-makers understand that respect for lawful expression is not a matter to be traded away to appease salaried activists, but something backed by a regulator with real powers and the capacity to impose real consequences. If the scheme works as intended, that is the culture it may gradually help to create.