Free Speech Fine Against Sussex Following Philosopher’s Resignation Overturned

About a year ago, the UK government’s Office for Students (OfS) (whose “free speech czar” is philosopher Arif Ahmed) levied a fine of  £585,000 on the University of Sussex after investigating how the university handled the case of philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned after students protested her views and called for her to be fired.

That fine has now been overturned by the UK’s high court, reports The Guardian.

The court

rejected claims that the university breached free speech regulations in a case involving its former professor Kathleen Stock. The ruling is a damaging blow to the credibility and management of the Office for Students as the court rejected the regulator’s lengthy investigation involving Stock’s resignation in 2021, which followed protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.

While the investigation seemed prompted by those student protests, the official OfS criticism of Sussex ended up focusing mainly on the university’s trans and non-binary equality policy statement (which is largely about equal opportunity and treatment for trans students, and about the unacceptability of “abuse, harassment, or bullying” directed at trans people because they’re trans) and the alleged “chilling effects” of that policy.

Overall, the ruling states that “OfS has misdirected itself in a number of key ways” and found for the university on most of the issues.

It also stated that the OfS was “biased” in its investigation:

The OfS was determined to find significant breaches and therefore had no wish to consider whether the University had now complied. To reach a conclusion that the breaches had been remedied would have undermined the strategy that… the OfS had adopted in October 2021, pursued for three and a half years, and invested very significant resources into. The evidence supports a finding that the OfS had closed its mind to anything that would lead to not finding breaches and being unable to therefore sanction the University.

You can read the decision in its entirety here.