I.

Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in the US, has called free speech an “eternally radical idea.” Throughout history, authorities have suppressed the free expression of ideas, silenced dissent, and punished heretics. The right to freedom of speech must be fought for, justified, and elucidated by each new generation.

Academic freedom is closely related to free speech, although the concept is more limited in scope. Nevertheless, it merits an enhanced level of protection because it derives from the distinctive status of the university as an institution and community devoted to the pursuit of truth. Without academic freedom, knowledge stagnates, inquiry bends to power, and our understanding of the world atrophies.

What follows is a story about free speech and academic freedom. It is the story of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act—a pivotal piece of legislation that emerged at a time when free expression in UK universities was under mounting siege. Proposed, resisted, weakened, restored, and nearly lost again, it became a battleground for policymakers, academics, activists, and university leaders grappling with the future of open discourse.

It is also a personal story.

II.

By 2020, no-platforming speakers in UK universities had become commonplace. In February 2020, two such incidents occurred in a single week at Oxford University, including the high-profile case of former home secretary Amber Rudd.

More disturbingly, academics were being sanctioned by their own institutions for expressing lawful but controversial views. In 2019, the interdisciplinary postdoctoral researcher Noah Carl was fired by the University of Cambridge following a mobbing campaign that denounced his work—without providing any evidence—as “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed.” Academics who challenged gender orthodoxy, such as Professor Kathleen Stock, faced sustained harassment and physical intimidation from students and masked protesters on campus with little support from their institutions.

Academics’ Mobbing of a Young Scholar Must be Denounced

Which of these, or any of Dr Carl’s other papers, contain “vital errors in data-analysis”? We’re not told.

QuilletteQuillette

Far more consequential than examples like these was the wider chilling effect they produced, which disproportionately affects academics and students holding minority views. A 2017 survey found that 35 percent of UK academics were self-censoring; that number rose to 72 percent among those who supported Brexit. Universities were incorporating contested political positions on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) into promotion decisions. Concepts like microaggressions were being embedded into universities’ harassment policies and mandatory training was being introduced, often using scientifically dubious implicit association tests based on unconscious-bias theory.

In response to these trends, the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto pledged to strengthen legal protections for academic freedom and free speech. Reports from think tanks Cieo, Policy Exchange, and Civitas in 2020 further highlighted the growing censorship culture in UK universities. The UK government issued a policy paper in February 2021 setting out concrete proposals for a new law to secure and promote free speech on campus. 

Then, on 12 May 2021, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill was formally introduced in the House of Commons by Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education. At the heart of this new Bill were three core duties for universities in England:

• The governing body of each university must take reasonably practicable steps to secure freedom of speech and academic freedom within the law for its staff, students and visiting speakers.
• Universities must maintain a Code of Practice for Free Speech, which must include the procedures to be followed by staff and students to organise events on campus.
• Universities must actively promote the importance of free speech and academic freedom, the goal here being to create a culture of free speech within universities.

Additional provisions extended these obligations to student unions and required monitoring of overseas funding arrangements.

The duties stipulated by the bill were not entirely novel. Section 43 of the Education (No 2) Act 1986 already required universities in England and Wales to uphold free speech. However, this mandate had proved to be toothless because the only way of forcing universities to comply was to bring a judicial review in the High Court, a lengthy, risky, and expensive procedure. What set the new bill apart was its introduction of two key enforcement mechanisms.

First, it established the position of director for freedom of speech and academic freedom, who would sit on the board of the Office for Students (OfS)—the independent regulator for higher education in England—and serve as a “free speech tsar.” The director would oversee a new free-speech complaints scheme, a cost-free process allowing staff, students, and speakers to file complaints against universities that failed to uphold their legal duty to secure free speech. Institutions found to be in violation could face sanctions from the OfS.

Second, the bill included a “statutory tort” provision, which would serve as a judicial backstop. This allowed individuals whose free-speech rights had been violated to sue universities directly in court, providing a legal route for redress beyond regulatory penalties.

The bill faced immediate opposition from a range of organisations, including the National Union of Students (which maintained that there was “no evidence” of a freedom of speech crisis) and university lobby groups concerned about legal risks. The influential Russell Group, representing 24 elite research-intensive universities, argued that the duty to promote free speech could hinder their efforts to advance equality and diversity. The progress of the bill was therefore unusually slow and opposed at every turn. Even the ministers in the ruling Conservative government seemed to lose interest in it after a while. Nevertheless, the bill’s progress was sustained by free-speech campaigners and a few dedicated special advisors within government.

On 28 June 2022, the bill was debated in the House of Lords—home to many members with close ties to university leadership—where it encountered strong resistance. The statutory-tort provision proved particularly controversial due to its potential to expose universities to significant legal liabilities. As pressure mounted to weaken the bill, the Free Speech Union—a mass-membership UK organisation that had been campaigning for it—organised a letter in November 2022, signed by over fifty prominent UK academics, urging the government to stand firm. But on 7 December 2022, following intensive lobbying from university vice-chancellors and their representatives, the House of Lords voted to remove the statutory-tort clause completely. The Russell Group welcomed the decision.

If one’s thinking is aligned with dominant ideological narratives, intellectual life on campus can seem unrestricted.                                                   

III.

I had been following the passage of the bill closely, and this latest development felt like a huge setback. The bill had been the only glimmer of hope in an increasingly dark time for free speech and academic freedom. The statutory tort wasn’t just another provision—it was the only mechanism that allowed universities to be held accountable in court for failing to uphold their free-speech obligations.

Until that day, I had been a passive observer of the growth of cancel culture in academia. But I decided to send an email to the Free Speech Union asking if there was anything I could do to help. Within an hour, I received a reply from Toby Young, the Union’s founder and general secretary, suggesting that I write a letter to Claire Coutinho, the minister responsible for the bill’s passage through parliament.

Over the next week, with help from John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London, I drafted a letter to Coutinho describing the precarious state of free speech at universities and urging the government to reinstate the statutory tort. I sent the draft to around fifty prominent mathematicians, a dozen of whom agreed to sign. Knowing that Coutinho had studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford, we framed our appeal as fellow mathematicians, highlighting the erosion of academic freedom and its impact on us and our students.

I sent the letter to Coutinho on 29 December 2022. In late January, she replied, affirming her strong support for academic freedom and requesting a meeting to discuss these issues further. Today, she is widely regarded as a rising star of the Conservative Party. At the time, however, she had only been a junior minister in the Department for Education for less than two months. Her ministerial responsibilities included freedom of speech, which made her directly responsible for the bill.

On 6 February 2023, I had a half-hour online meeting with Coutinho. I stressed the importance of the statutory tort, which peers in the House of Lords had just removed. We discussed the state of free speech and censorship at universities. She was curious and disturbed to learn about the recent movement to “decolonise” the mathematics curriculum, which politicises mathematics teaching and, at its most extreme, disputes the epistemic privilege of formal mathematical reasoning itself.

Speaking on the floor of the house the following day, Coutinho strongly defended the tort as “critical to stimulating the cultural transformation” necessary for free speech, citing her conversations with “leaders and academics in the higher education sector.” She spoke of how this generation was facing its “own battle for freedom: the freedom to express our opinions and debate controversial ideas without fear or favour.” The Commons voted 283–161 to reinstate the tort in full.

The bill then returned to the House of Lords, where peers again attempted to dilute the tort. Between February and May 2023, I sent three more letters to Coutinho about this issue, and I received thoughtful replies to each of them. In one of those letters, I mentioned the case of Canadian political scientist Frances Widdowson, whose talk at Wilfrid Laurier University led to the university instituting a new security-fee policy—a cautionary tale of how academic-freedom policies can be undermined without proper enforcement. “Academic freedom enjoys a special status in our law,” Coutinho replied, “reflecting the high level of importance that the courts have consistently placed upon it. I stand firm on the inclusion of the tort in the Bill. Only in this way will we truly see the shift in culture and behaviour on campus that will support intellectual debate.”

The Problem With ‘Indigenizing the University’

Everyone, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, is free to explore their own spiritual beliefs, of course. But the university is not the place for such exercises.

QuilletteFrances Widdowson

Claire Coutinho steered the Freedom of Speech Bill through choppy waters and continued to engage with academics, politicians, and free-speech campaigners. With remarkable political skill, she found an acceptable compromise on the tort—a complainant would have to exhaust the free-speech complaints scheme before going to court, unless bringing civil proceedings for an injunction only. As a result, Coutinho successfully got the bill over the line. 

The bill was passed by both houses on 10 May 2023 and received Royal Assent the following day, officially becoming the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. I was at a mathematics conference in the Black Forest, Germany, when I heard the news. It was a poignant and joyful evening. A cloud seemed to lift; the tide seemed to be turning. I poured myself a glass of wine and celebrated.

IV.

On 1 June 2023, the government announced that the inaugural director for freedom of speech and academic freedom at the OfS—the new position created by the Act—would be Arif Ahmed, a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge and a leading advocate of free speech and academic freedom. Two years earlier, Ahmed had successfully campaigned for Cambridge to alter a proposed policy from requiring staff to “respect” each other’s opinions to “tolerate” them—a small but crucial distinction in safeguarding freedom of thought and conscience. He was respected across the political spectrum, and for free-speech advocates, he was the ideal choice.

In an op-ed for the Times published on the day of his appointment, Ahmed wrote: “I have no interest in any ‘culture war.’ I will defend free speech within the law for all views and approaches: postcolonial theory as much as gender-critical feminism.”

Ahmed reinforced this message in a major speech that October: “This is not a partisan role. I really can’t stress enough that there is absolutely no question of conforming university teaching or research to any political agenda. … More concretely, this means that we will take a broadly viewpoint neutral approach.” He added that “free speech is, and always has been, a counter-majoritarian principle. It is literally there to protect minorities. Saying it is OK that self-censorship only affects a minority is like saying it is OK that poor healthcare only affects people who are unwell.”

The Freedom of Speech Act was now the law of the land, and the director was in place, but the main provisions of the Act had yet to be activated. Their implementation depended on the government laying a statutory instrument—a form of secondary legislation in the UK used to bring specific parts of an Act into force or clarify technical details. Unlike primary legislation, statutory instruments do not require full parliamentary approval. In this case, the statutory instrument would specify the commencement date for these provisions.

In September 2023, it was announced that the Act would be implemented in phases to give universities sufficient time to prepare for the new regulatory framework. The main provisions—including the new duties and the two crucial enforcement mechanisms—were scheduled to come into force on 1 August 2024. In other words, nearly fifteen months would pass between the Act’s passage and the commencement of its key provisions.

I assumed that Ahmed was simply exercising caution, ensuring everything was properly set up. We now know that unelected civil servants at the Department for Education recommended this start date and ministers agreed. But fifteen months is a long time and plenty can go wrong.

V.

Though its main provisions were not even in force, the Freedom of Speech Act had already started improving the free-speech climate in universities. The mere existence of the Act—and the looming prospect of its enforcement mechanisms—had focused the minds of university administrators.

In May 2023, shortly after the Act’s passage, Kathleen Stock—the philosopher hounded out of Sussex University in 2021 for expressing nuanced views on sex and gender—was invited to participate in a debate at Oxford. Predictably, this elicited protests from activists vehemently opposed to her views and demands that the invitation be withdrawn. However, an open letter signed by 44 academics reaffirmed that universities were places to openly discuss contentious views. Claire Coutinho warned that the new Act would soon ensure that visiting speakers who have their “free speech rights unlawfully restricted on campus can seek redress.” The event went ahead as planned.

Through the second half of 2023, universities across England began revamping their Free Speech Codes of Practice. This was a palpable shift from previous years—for the first time, vice-chancellors and senior administrators were taking free speech and academic freedom seriously. By incentivising universities to prioritise these fundamental values, the Act had made enough leeway to start changing free-speech culture.

A key player here was Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF), an organisation founded in late 2006 to defend unimpeded academic inquiry. In 2022, under the leadership of Dennis Hayes, AFAF began to establish a network of campus branches committed to upholding freedom of expression. By the end of 2023, there were over fifteen branches across the UK, most of which were formed after the passage of the Freedom of Speech Act. 

In October 2023, twenty-odd academics, myself among them, founded the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom (LUCAF), a new academic-led and non-partisan organisation committed to developing and sharing best practices on academic freedom and pluralism. The group was chaired by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London and a prominent voice on the threats to academic freedom posed by gender-identity ideology. LUCAF held its launch event in November 2023, featuring a lecture from Akua Reindorf KC about UK laws governing academic freedom and harassment. By the end of the year, LUCAF had grown to well over 100 members.

In November 2023, Edward Skidelsky, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, founded the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) to monitor ongoing threats to academic freedom and provide academics with a forum in which they could speak openly. 

After years of growing ideological homogeneity in academia and the suppression of dissenting voices, this was a season of renewed optimism.

A grassroots community was taking shape, committed to defending free speech and academic freedom. Lectures and conferences on free inquiry and academic freedom were taking place nearly every month, fostering discussion, encouraging debate, and expanding the free-speech movement. After years of growing ideological homogeneity in academia and the suppression of dissenting voices, this was a season of renewed optimism. A brighter future finally seemed within reach.  

VI.

In December 2023, the OfS took its first concrete step toward implementing the Freedom of Speech Act by outlining proposed rules for the new free-speech complaints scheme, set to take effect in August 2024. These proposals, which would be subject to consultation, were highly detailed and showed the great care with which Arif Ahmed had developed them.

Wherever the Act had given the OfS discretion, the proposed rules were particularly robust. For example, the OfS adopted a broad definition of a “visiting speaker”—an invitation to a speaker need not have been approved by the university. The OfS also pointed out that a university’s refusal to approve an invitation could itself raise concerns about whether it had breached its legal duty to uphold free speech.

Perhaps even more consequential was the approach taken by the OfS to ensure that academic orthodoxy would not throttle the new protections. Academic standards are often conflated with prevailing scholarly consensus. Galileo's theories were considered absurd, foolish, and dangerous in their day. Alfred Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics was dismissed as meritless when it was first published in 1915. David Card and Alan B. Krueger’s contrarian 1995 work on the minimum wage was initially excoriated and likened to “repealing the law of gravity” by mainstream economists—yet this work later won a Nobel prize.

In his famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argues that the pursuit of truth depends on the freedom to express all opinions. The silencing of any opinion, he wrote, robs all of us:

• If the opinion is true, we are able to exchange “error for truth.”
• If it is false, we nonetheless gain a “clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
• If the opinion is partly true, we need it “to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.”

Today, the opinions most in need of protection within academia are contrarian positions on highly charged topics such as race, sex, gender, and group differences. These are precisely the areas where institutions, under activist pressure, are most likely to sanction or dismiss academic staff.

Before the OfS proposals emerged, the primary guidance on academic freedom in the UK came from Strasbourg jurisprudence on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Convention framework grants enhanced protection for academic free expression, provided it falls within an academic’s field of expertise and meets academic standards. However, this creates a blind spot: if courts rely on mainstream academic experts to assess whether controversial work meets those standards, those experts—often steeped in prevailing orthodoxies—are likely to take a negative view.

The OfS recognised this issue, so it said it would only seek expert academic judgement on free speech complaints if it deemed it necessary. By freeing itself from mandatory reliance on academic gatekeepers, the OfS was making a genuine attempt to carve out, for the first time, a viewpoint-neutral framework in English law. All free speech groups in the UK responded enthusiastically to the proposals. LUCAF submitted a detailed consultation response supporting the OfS’s approach and suggesting further ways to strengthen them. 

However, various universities and sector groups argued that the proposals were unrealistic, that they granted the OfS too much discretion, and that they should therefore be scaled back. As I pointed out in an article at Times Higher Education at the time, these objections were simply an attempt to retain control. Those days were coming to an end. Under the leadership of Arif Ahmed, the OfS would hold them to account for any future failings.

VII.

Academic freedom means the right of scholars to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with their intellectual convictions without fear of retaliation or the risk of losing their jobs. It is designed to keep free inquiry and the pursuit of truth at the heart of academic life.

The concept of academic freedom was originally developed to shield universities from interference by the Church and the State. Protecting scholars’ freedom went hand in hand with ensuring the independence of institutions of higher learning from these powerful external forces. In 1957, towards the end of the McCarthy era, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, declaring that a university’s right to determine “who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study” was essential to academic freedom.

The Freedom of Speech Act has faced criticism for infringing on this institutional autonomy, granting regulators and courts greater authority over university governance. However, institutional autonomy is best viewed as a means to a greater purpose: securing the academic freedom of the individuals who constitute the institution.

Institutional autonomy was once a bulwark against infringements of academic freedom; today, it too often enables them.

In liberal democracies today, the greatest threats to academic freedom no longer come from external forces but from within academia: censorious colleagues and students, ideologically loaded training, and university leaders who fail to take a stand against cancel culture. Institutional autonomy was once a bulwark against infringements of academic freedom; today, it too often enables them.

Science is sometimes thought to be more resistant to politicisation than other academic disciplines. This makes it a valuable test case to understand some of the most pernicious internal threats to academic freedom. A recent paper by 39 prominent scientists represents the first systematic attempt to understand ideological censorship of science. One of its key findings is that censorship is frequently carried out by scientists themselves, under the pretext of protecting others from purported “harm.” This kind of censorship is frequently couched in the language of legitimate scientific criticism—enabled by subjective publishing criteria that allow gatekeepers to exaggerate flaws or impose unreasonable demands to justify rejecting unpalatable findings.

But such attempts at censoring unpleasant research findings are misguided. As Alan Sokal pointed out, “Research [cannot] justify undermining the human rights of specific groups … because one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ … ideas should not be suppressed because some people might misuse them; rather, it is the misuse that should be criticised instead.”  

A recent landmark study by Clark et al. surveyed 470 top psychology professors on ten controversial scientific propositions in their field. These included “taboo conclusions” such as:

• “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.”
• “Genetic differences explain non-trivial variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.”
• “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.”

Contrary to the dominant narrative—which claims a broad expert consensus rejecting these conclusions—the study found no such consensus. Instead, experts were deeply divided. However, the study also revealed that professors who privately accepted these propositions were more likely to self-censor, fearing the career consequences of expressing their true views. This self-censorship reinforces the illusion of consensus and fuels a spiral of silence.

In early 2024, a campaign was launched to fire interdisciplinary philosopher Nathan Cofnas after he self-published an essay on group differences and their political implications. Dr Bronwen Everill, director of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, likened his employment to “having a flat-earther on the physics faculty.” However, as the Clark et al. study suggests, many experts privately share Cofnas’s central assumption that genetic differences contribute to variations in the average distribution of psychological traits across racial groups. Nonetheless, on 5 April 2024, Emmanuel College, Cambridge severed ties with Cofnas, reportedly because his essay “amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies.”

In 1930s Russia, Trofim Lysenko asserted that all science is class-oriented in nature. His anti-Mendelian views became the official Communist Party line and classical genetics became known as "fascist science.” Over 3,000 scientists were executed, imprisoned, or exiled. The effect on agriculture and food production was devastating.

Today, censorship motivated by the mashup of ideologies sometimes referred to as the “identity synthesis” or “critical social justice” (or, colloquially, “wokeism”) is embedded within the policies of scientific journals as well as those of research funders. This politicisation of science undermines merit, restricts academic freedom, and seeks to replace liberal epistemology—rooted in objective truth, rationality, and the scientific method—with a framework that prioritises “multiple narratives” and “alternative ways of knowing.”  

Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method. As J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, the scientist “must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” When papers on one side of a debate are censored or ignored for political reasons, the scientific record is distorted. This, in turn, enables gatekeepers to justify further suppression by presenting the science as settled. In this way, scientific censorship becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

When academic freedom protections become contingent upon expert opinion on the quality of the contested work or the academic expertise of its author, it places orthodoxy-challenging work at risk. When universities punish researchers for pursuing “problematic” lines of inquiry, we all lose. The censorship and self-censorship of scientists damages public trust in science and harms society. As evolutionary biologist Steve-Stewart Williams put it, “Censoring science blunts our ability to understand the world. … By blunting our ability to understand the world, we also blunt our ability to make the world a better place.” 

The Freedom of Speech Act was designed to protect the contrarians, the heretics, the offensive, the foolish, the Galileos. It was intended to strike a blow against scientific censorship and help to make the world a better place.

VIII.

In March 2024, the OfS published its draft guidance for consultation. Its primary aim was to clarify the “reasonably practicable steps” that universities and student unions were expected to take to secure freedom of speech within the law, as required by the new Act.

It was an extraordinary document that addressed almost every issue that academic-freedom advocates had been raising for years. The guidance made clear that:

• Universities must not require job candidates to demonstrate commitment to specific political positions, values, or beliefs, as is often the case with mandatory “diversity statements.”
• Academic research must not be restricted by a university due to perceived or actual conflict with its institutional values or concerns about reputational damage.
• Speech in academic contexts will not constitute unlawful harassment except in the most exceptional circumstances.
• Universities cannot impose blanket bans on transmitting offensive material via their internet facilities.
• Members of diversity and inclusion committees and appointment panels will receive formal training on upholding free speech.
• Social media pile-ons calling for staff to be fired over lawful speech must be promptly rejected by university management.
• Curriculum decisions must safeguard academic freedom, ensuring that both academics and students have the opportunity to engage with controversial and unpopular ideas.

And so on.

I still remember reading that guidance for the first time. I was so thrilled that I couldn’t get any work done for the rest of that day. One of my LUCAF colleagues said it brought tears of joy to his eyes. Ian Pace, LUCAF secretary and co-convener of the City University branch of AFAF, dissected the guidance in a long article for the Critic, concluding that it stood “to bring about a revolution in higher education.”

But for every action, there is a reaction—and the backlash from opponents of academic freedom was swift and visceral. The University and College Union (UCU)—the UK’s largest trade union for university and college staff, which has consistently failed to defend its members’ academic freedom—denounced the OfS as a “vehicle for government authoritarianism” that should be “abolished.” Jim Dickinson, an associate editor at Wonkhe, dismissed the guidance as “a heavy (handed) sandbag on one end of campus culture’s see-saw.” The initial reactions from the Russell Group and Universities UK were muted, but they later made clear their strong objections.

Determined to ensure that free-speech advocates had a strong voice in the debate, I led the drafting of LUCAF’s response to the consultation—a process that consumed nearly ten days of nonstop work. The final document was a carefully argued defence of the OfS guidance, affirming our strong support while also proposing modest but meaningful improvements and clarifications. It remains a piece of work of which I am particularly proud.

For those committed to protecting academic freedom, the OfS guidance was transformative and something we had waited our lives to see. Those who had insisted that academic freedom should be tightly controlled, subjected to gatekeeping, or curtailed by proportional restrictions had lost the battle. On 26 May, Bryn Harris, the chief legal counsel of the Free Speech Union, addressed these opponents in a tweet thread: 

[I]n 2021 the Tories tabled a Bill to protect free speech on campus. Clever opponents simply talked past it & didn’t engage: “there isn’t a problem to debate here—cancel culture doesn’t exist haha.”

Skip forward to the present: the sensibles have lost an argument that they simply tried to talk past, and under Arif Ahmed the OfS is proposing a regime so radically pro-free speech it could have been written by the Free Speech Union. Not so clever now.

The eternally radical idea of free speech was about to be restored to English universities.

IX.

It is now clear that the March 2024 OfS draft guidance alarmed university leaders more than was initially apparent. The guidance required universities to terminate or amend overseas partnerships that had the effect of restricting lawful free speech for students and staff in English universities. 

In recent years, universities in the UK have become increasingly reliant on fee income from overseas students. The largest sending country is China, with over 150,000 students enrolled in 2021–22, according to official figures. Chinese students in the UK are often closely watched by Chinese security services and pressured against exercising their free-speech rights on campus. Some even play an active role in censoring others. The Chinese Communist Party seeks to control the global academic narrative on China, and its influence over permissible discourse in UK universities has grown over time, contributing to the erosion of academic freedom.

Britain’s Golden Slumber

The British establishment’s China policy resembles a man periodically waking only to fall asleep again.

QuilletteAaron Sarin

Universities have largely failed to address this issue. In many cases, their reflexive response has been to further restrict free speech and academic freedom. At UCL, Associate Professor and LUCAF founder member Michelle Shipworth found her Data Detectives module taken away from her when a student complained about a ten-year-old teaching exercise (“Why are there so many slaves in China?”) intended to encourage critical evaluation of a problematic dataset. At the University of Nottingham, senior administrators asked Professor Steve Tsang to cancel the invitation of a Taiwanese politician to speak at an academic event.

Confucius Institutes, long a source of controversy, form a key pillar of many British universities’ ties to China. The OfS guidance placed the future of these institutes in question, along with that of the China Scholarship Council, which has been described as a tool of Chinese Communist Party statecraft and brings a significant number of students to the UK. Additionally, the guidance urged universities to support their academics, even if doing so risked upsetting foreign governments.

For universities heavily reliant on income from Chinese students, the OfS guidance may have seemed like an existential threat.

Above all, the message to university vice-chancellors was unmistakable: Arif Ahmed meant business. Universities had to ensure the protection of free speech and academic freedom—if that required them to change their operational approach, so be it. For universities heavily reliant on income from Chinese students, the guidance may have seemed like an existential threat.

Following publication of the guidance, opposition to the Act among university leaders hardened. We now know that powerful sector groups such as the Russell Group and Universities UK held several meetings with officials at the Department for Education. They also met with key figures from the opposition Labour Party, which was expected to win the next general election.

Some UK Jewish organisations became unlikely allies of university leaders in opposing the Act. By Spring 2024, university campuses had become focal points for pro-Palestine protests and encampments, driven by the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Amid rising concerns over antisemitism, some within the Jewish community questioned the implications of campus free-speech protections, though opinions varied widely. Antisemitic incidents on UK campuses—including death threats, physical assaults, and harassment—were deeply troubling. These acts were already illegal, and nothing in the Act protected them. What the Act did permit was the expression of ideas that some Jewish students might find uncomfortable, offensive, or wrongheaded—but that is precisely what universities are for.

If the history of free speech teaches us anything, it is that minority groups have the most to gain from strong protections for free expression—and the most to lose when those rights are neglected. Civil rights hero John Lewis argued that, without free speech, the civil-rights movement would have been “a bird without wings.” Yet, the leadership of the Union of Jewish Students—an influential organisation representing Jewish students in the UK and Ireland—strongly opposed the Act, as did the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

As spring turned to summer, these groups ramped up their lobbying efforts, working behind the scenes to delay or weaken the Freedom of Speech Act’s implementation. Their manna from heaven arrived soon after.

X.

On 22 May 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stood in the rain outside 10 Downing Street and called a shock general election for 4 July—months earlier than expected. Purdah guidelines meant that the final versions of the OfS guidance and complaints-scheme rules could now only be released after the election.

On election day, the Labour Party won a landslide. Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister, and on 5 July, he appointed Bridget Phillipson as secretary of state for education. Phillipson was cut from a different cloth to Claire Coutinho. She saw the Freedom of Speech Act as an unnecessary piece of Tory legislation designed to stoke culture wars. The previous year, she had called the OfS a “politicised regulator” and vowed to ensure that universities were recognised as “a public good, not a political battleground.”

The Labour manifesto had been silent on the issue of free speech. The statutory instrument confirming the 1 August commencement date of the key provisions was already in place. It is extremely rare for a statutory instrument to be revoked once laid, and almost unheard of when the corresponding Act had passed Parliament more than a year earlier.

On 8 July, the Monday after the election, I sent Bridget Phillipson a letter, co-signed by several LUCAF founding members. We urged her to resist pressure from university vice-chancellors or their representatives to delay or halt the Act’s implementation. We stressed that such lobbying rarely involved consultation with the academic staff of the universities concerned. We emphasised that universities would only be recognised as a public good if they protected free speech and restored public trust in their impartiality. We received no reply.

Bridget Phillipson had killed the Freedom of Speech Act—six days before its key provisions were set to take effect.

On 24 July, Phillipson faced Parliament for a lengthy debate on the new government’s education plans. She did not utter a single word about the Act or her stance on free speech. Still, something was clearly brewing—why else had the OfS still not released the final guidance or complaints scheme rules? The answer came at 9:40 am on Friday 26 July. Phillipson issued a written statement, which appeared on the parliamentary website. Much of her statement addressed a recent report on how the OfS should sharpen focus on priorities such as financial sustainability, quality assurance, and protecting public money. The final paragraph, however, took a chilling turn:

Lastly, I have written to colleagues separately about my decision to stop further commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, in order to consider options, including its repeal. I am aware of concerns that the Act would be burdensome on providers and on the OfS, and I will confirm my long term plans as soon as possible.

Bridget Phillipson had killed the Freedom of Speech Act—six days before its key provisions were set to take effect. The death sentence had been slipped in at the end of an otherwise mundane statement, almost as an afterthought. She hadn’t even bothered to announce it on the floor of Parliament. What does it mean for our democracy when a minister can, without scrutiny, halt the commencement of legislation? What does it mean for the regulatory state when its priority is to appease senior managers in the very sector it is meant to regulate? What does it mean for higher education when universities betray their own historic purpose?

And how could the Conservatives fail to deliver the one legislative achievement of which they could have been rightly proud after fourteen years in power—the only glimmer of hope for protecting academic freedom in this darkening hour? This would have been the only unabashedly pro-free-speech law passed in the history of the United Kingdom. Grief, it is said, comes in waves. For a while, all you can do is float. 

XI.

The Act seemed to be dead. Everything we had worked for—years of effort—looked to have vanished. But as long as there was a sliver of hope, we had one last battle to wage. The day after Bridget Phillipson’s decision, she wrote to MPs, justifying it by claiming the Act would be “damaging to the welfare of students.” Government sources told the BBC it was an “anti-semite charter” that could allow Holocaust deniers onto campuses.

These claims were deeply misleading. English law already prohibits harassment and incitement to hatred, and the Act did nothing to change that. It simply required universities to uphold free speech within the law. It defined “freedom of speech” according to the European Convention of Human Rights, Article 17 of which excludes Holocaust denial. Further, universities had to only take reasonably practicable steps to secure lawful free speech—allowing them to impose proportionate restrictions where necessary.

Phillipson’s announcement came just two working days before Parliament’s summer recess, ensuring no parliamentary scrutiny until September. Her ultimate goal was clearly a full repeal. To have any hope of salvaging the Act, free-speech advocates had to keep the issue alive in the news cycle and apply relentless pressure on the government.

Within a day, three powerful articles criticising Phillipson’s decision appeared—by Andrew Tettenborn in the Spectator, Claire Fox in the Daily Telegraph, and Andrew Doyle in UnHerd. On 29 July, The Times published a blistering editorial condemning the absence of parliamentary consultation. The same day, Toby Young debunked the government’s arguments in the Critic. On 30 July, Julius Grower wrote a piece for the Daily Sceptic, while I published an op-ed in Times Higher Education. 

Then came the legal challenge. On 2 August, the Free Speech Union sent a pre-action letter to the government—the first step toward judicial review—arguing that Phillipson had acted illegally in revoking the statutory instrument. The same day, barrister Akua Reindorf debunked a number of myths about the Act in the New Statesman. On 4 August, Kathleen Stock invoked her own experiences to defend the legislation in the Sunday Times. On 9 August, Helen Joyce published a damning essay in the Times, linking the government’s decision to universities’ financial ties to China.

Momentum was building. On 15 August, over 550 academics signed an open letter to Phillipson defending the Freedom of Speech Act. Organised by Edward Skidelsky, the letter drew signatures from across the political spectrum, including from prominent figures like Richard Dawkins. It was becoming clear to the government that the issue could not be swept under the carpet.

After AFAF, LUCAF, and CAF sent the Department for Education (DfE) a letter, DfE officials agreed to meet with us on 20 August to hear our case. We argued that universities were failing to protect free speech under existing frameworks. Any improvements had come from anticipation of the Act, and without it, progress would stall or reverse. The open letter from academics demonstrated that support for the Act was widespread across the sector, not confined to specific lobby groups. The issue was not going away, and we would continue writing about it. Officials promised to convey our views to ministers and insisted that no final decision had been made.

On 24 August, the Telegraph published a bombshell article claiming that vice-chancellors’ fear about the Act jeopardising relationships with authoritarian regimes, particularly China, played a key role in pausing the legislation. Prominent politicians weighed in and condemned the government for caving to foreign influence. On 27 August, the eminent Jewish historian David Abulafia argued in the Jewish Chronicle that stopping the Act would harm Jewish groups more than their detractors: “The Act provides a platform for those of us who wish to speak for the Jewish community and for Israel.”

On 30 August, Akua Reindorf clinically dismantled the claim that the Act would give “free rein” to antisemites and Holocaust deniers. The Act, she pointed out, “is not a hate speech charter; it is a free speech charter and a serious and nuanced piece of human rights legislation.” On 1 September, Sonia Sodha wrote an op-ed for the Observer, a newspaper influential among Labour leaders, urging the government “to stop seeing important free speech protections introduced by Tory ministers as expendable fuel for attacking their predecessors.”

Parliament returned on 2 September. A week later, Phillipson addressed the issue in the Commons, responding to Richard Holden MP. She said that universities minister Jacqui Smith was consulting stakeholders and that “no options were off the table.” She repeated the misleading claim that the Act could enable hate speech and denied that foreign funding concerns had influenced her decision. By mid-September, seven Nobel Laureates had signed the open letter, bringing the total number of signatories to nearly 650 academics. The suspension of the Act had become a full-blown political flashpoint.

On 18 September, five representatives from academic-freedom organisations, including myself, met with Jacqui Smith, the Minister for Universities and Skills. A former home secretary and centrist Labour heavyweight, Smith listened carefully to our concerns. She acknowledged that universities were failing to protect free speech and she agreed that this was a problem. We emphasised that universities wouldn’t safeguard free speech and academic freedom without enforceable legislation. There was no substitute for this Act. Smith assured us that the government was genuinely listening.

Soon, rumours started to surface of an internal battle within government, with Bridget Phillipson continuing to push for a full repeal of the Act, and Jacqui Smith making the case for a partial restoration.

Soon, rumours started to surface of an internal battle within government, with Bridget Phillipson continuing to push for a full repeal of the Act, and Jacqui Smith making the case for a partial restoration. On 16 October, Rishi Sunak asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Parliament how the government planned to counter Chinese influence in UK universities after blocking the Freedom of Speech Act. Starmer dodged the question, dismissing it as “political point scoring.”

World-renowned intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Nadine Strossen, novelists like Ian McEwan, and actors like Stephen Fry now joined the fight, signing a new open letter calling for the Act’s reinstatement. The effort to gather signatories was spearheaded by Julius Grower, an associate professor of law at Oxford, who had played a key role in shaping the bill during its passage through Parliament.

In late October, the Free Speech Union secured a major victory: the High Court granted permission for a full judicial review of Phillipson’s decision. The case rested on two grounds: first, that she lacked the legal authority to revoke the statutory instrument; second, that she had failed to give due regard to equality considerations—such as the impact on gender-critical feminists—before making her hasty decision. The hearing was scheduled for 23 January 2025.

In preparation, the Free Speech Union asked two academics to submit written witness statements. The first was Jo Phoenix, who had been constructively dismissed from her position at the Open University after a “targeted campaign of harassment” for establishing a gender-critical research network. The other academic witness was me.

XII.

In late November, the Free Speech Union sent me the government’s court submissions to help me prepare my witness statement. Among them were internal emails, statements, and documents from the DfE shedding new light on the decision to halt the Act.

I discovered that civil servants had been laying the groundwork to pause the Act long before Labour took office. As early as 24 May—just two days after the general election was called—a senior DfE official had already been tasked by her director with finding a way to block the Act’s implementation. By 24 June, the same official was instructed to have the legal instruments ready to suspend the Act on day one of a new government—and to be prepared to advise incoming ministers on repeal.

I also learned that, on 30 July, civil servants presented Bridget Phillipson with a ministerial submission outlining options for the Act’s future. Option 1 was repealing the Act in full. If any part of it were to be kept, they proposed three “packages”—all of which involved scrapping the statutory tort, and two of which also involved scrapping the complaints scheme. I don’t know the precise reasoning behind these proposals. However, it seems reasonable to assume that they were shaped by months of lobbying from university leaders.

Further emails revealed that after halting the Act, Phillipson and Smith wanted to announce a final decision before the 7 October anniversary of the Hamas attack—and this was likely to be a repeal, judging by the tone of the correspondence. Yet December had arrived, and no announcement had been made. The intensity and scale of our resistance had clearly caught the government off-guard and forced them to reconsider.

In late December, I organised another open letter urging the government to reinstate the Act in full and preserve the statutory tort. It concluded:

There is no justice without access to justice. Creating liability risk for universities that ignore their free speech duties is the most effective way to ensure that free speech is always factored in, substantively, when making decisions. The inaction of the government on this issue is causing real harm to academics and students.

The letter gathered over 450 signatures in a week. Mark Twain once observed that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Two years after winning the battle for the tort with Coutinho, we were fighting it all over again.

At the same time, I finalised my written witness statement for the upcoming judicial review. I focused on dismantling the government’s claim that implementing the Act would be overly burdensome, explaining why their justifications didn’t hold up. Just before the Christmas break, the government received the witness statements from Jo Phoenix and me. Would they fight it out in court? Or would they back down and seek a compromise?

On 15 January 2025, Bridget Phillipson finally made her long-awaited announcement in Parliament. The Act would be partially restored. 

• The three key core duties for universities would remain unchanged, and take effect in time for the upcoming academic year.
• The complaints scheme would remain, but with two amendments—it would not be legally required to consider every complaint, and it would no longer consider complaints from students. 
• Arif Ahmed would continue as director for free speech and academic freedom.

As the core duties on higher education providers set out in the initial legislation remained unchanged, the March 2024 OfS draft guidance was as relevant as ever, and its final version would be published imminently. The judicial review brought by the Free Speech Union would be adjourned, as the government had promised to implement the bulk of the Act. But the statutory tort was gone, so there would no longer be a direct judicial route for enforcement. The duties on student unions were also scrapped. And the obligation to monitor overseas funding would be put on hold.

On 21 January, Jacqui Smith confirmed the government’s plans in the House of Lords. Baroness Barran, a Conservative life peer who had played a key role in the passage of the Act, acknowledged the efforts of those who had fought to reinstate the legislation:

I acknowledge the courage and energy of those academics who have campaigned to get this law enacted, including Dr Edward Skidelsky, who co-ordinated the letter of over 650 academics, Professor David Abulafia, Professor Alice Sullivan and Professor Abhishek Saha, as well as the women’s rights groups, including Sex Matters, led by the tireless Helen Joyce, the powerful legal interventions, including from Akua Reindorf KC and Dr Julius Grower, and the many groups that have campaigned on this issue.

Jacqui Smith agreed, adding: “I also share the noble Baroness’s admiration for those academics, many of whom I have spoken to as part of the consultation that we have done on this.”

It was a bittersweet moment. On 26 July, the Act had seemed dead, headed toward full repeal. Yet through sustained resistance, months of political pressure, and the looming judicial review—now poised to deliver the government a humiliating defeat in court—we had forced a partial restoration. This was not the full legislation as originally passed, but it was far better than losing it entirely.

XIII.

Over the Christmas break, I read Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama’s magnificent chronicle of free speech through the ages. What struck me most was how the debates we face today—about academic freedom, censorship, and the limits of expression—are far from new. The same arguments for gatekeeping have resurfaced time and again, reflecting the eternal divide between egalitarian and elitist conceptions of free expression. Another recurring theme in the book is the selective, unprincipled defence of speech—“free speech for me, but not for thee”—a hypocrisy that has plagued even its staunchest advocates throughout history and remains alive today.

No legislation can guarantee free speech if the cultural norms supporting it collapse.

But above all, the book is a stark reminder that history bends toward “free-speech entropy.” The struggle for free speech is never over; there may be setbacks and victories, but there will be no final triumph. The battle is perpetual. And law alone is never enough. No legislation can guarantee free speech if the cultural norms supporting it collapse. If free expression is to endure, we must actively foster a culture that allows it to thrive—one that defends dissenters, promotes intellectual diversity, and recognises the bright line separating speech and action. This requires institutional, communal, and individual efforts.

We must ensure that truth-seeking institutions remain neutral on matters of public debate. We must reimagine diversity and inclusion frameworks so that they are proportional, evidence-based, and respect academic freedom. We must revamp academic publishing, making it more transparent, open, and recommitted to its basic mission. We must build communities around free speech, organise events on free inquiry, and actively promote viewpoint diversity. And we must cultivate anti-fragility in young people—and in ourselves—so that we can disagree well.

Above all, individuals must act. Academics must be courageous, reject self-censorship, and remain true to their intellectual convictions. We must engage—respond to consultations, write letters, serve on committees, join free-speech groups, and shape key institutions. We must not forget that the values of free expression and free inquiry are fragile and can be threatened from any direction on the political compass. Free speech must be defended—not just for those we agree with, but for all. The battle doesn’t end here.