The University of Sussex is taking legal action to overturn a record fine levied by England’s higher education regulator, accusing the regulator of seeking to “persecute” it rather than solve problems.
This week the Office for Students (OfS) said it would fine Sussex £585,000 for two “historic” breaches of its regulations related to freedom of speech and governance. It comes after a three-and-a-half-year investigation into the resignation of Prof Kathleen Stock, who was the target of protests at Sussex over her views on gender identification and transgender rights.
The university intends to challenge the size of the fine – 15 times larger than any previous penalty levied by the OfS – through tribunal, and also seek a judicial review of the judgment.
Sasha Roseneil, who joined as vice-chancellor a year after the investigation began, said she was initially shocked by the OfS’s judgment but was confident the courts would find in the university’s favour.
“I think our position is extremely strong, and I think they will lose a judicial review. But I’m not surprised that they’ve dug in, because [the OfS] has been so determined to pursue this, and so unwilling to engage,” Roseneil said in an interview with the Guardian.
Roseneil said Sussex had substantially overturned sections of the OfS’s interim judgment, delivered last year, which would have fined the university £1m for a string of additional allegations.
She said: “The provisional decision was much, much worse, and we rebutted it at length. We sent back a 2,000-page response, and they have reduced the fine from the provisional decision – a million-pound fine – to £585,000 and they’ve dropped quite a lot of what they were alleging against us.
“They haven’t explained why they’ve dropped any of it but one has to imagine they realised that they weren’t on strong legal grounds, and we produced a lot of evidence against what they were saying, including evidence against what they’re still saying.”
An OfS spokesperson said: “We are confident in the decisions made in this case and will vigorously defend any legal action.”
Roseneil said the OfS refused to meet the leadership team at Sussex or interview those involved, with the exception of Stock, and instead relied on thousands of pages it requested from the university. She said that when she arrived at Sussex in 2022 she sought a meeting with OfS executives to discuss the investigation but was turned down.
Arif Ahmed, the OfS’s director for freedom of speech and academic freedom, defended the regulator’s methods. He said: “There may have been occasions where [Sussex] wanted to see somebody, and in fact that was done in writing instead, I’m quite sure that could well have happened. But the engagement would nevertheless have happened in the sense that we communicated with them and they communicated with us.”
But Roseneil said the OfS had refused to tell Sussex if its amended policies had met its conditions. She said: “We have been up for working with the OfS on these difficult issues but they have just wanted to prosecute us, even persecute us, on this. It’s a very sorry state for a regulator to be doing this rather than actually trying to help the sector work better.”
The OfS’s final ruling focuses on a trans and non-binary equality policy statement passed in 2018, which the regulator argued had “a chilling effect” that could result in self-censorship by staff and students.
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Stock, in her response, said the “most egregious” part of the statement was a clause that said “any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives”. She said she “tried to raise the matter with superiors but to no avail”, and added: “Over time, my teaching about sex and gender in feminist philosophy grew increasingly cautious, and most of my criticism of the sudden sanctification of gender identity took place elsewhere.”
Roseneil said: “Obviously she left long before I arrived but it is deeply regrettable that Kathleen [Stock] wasn’t supported to the extent that she felt able to stay working at Sussex. I regret that.”
But she said the OfS had erred by inflating the statement into a “governing document” of the university. “The whole case rests on it being a governing document. This is a really small statement, of which we have many dozens, if not hundreds, of similar policies and statements. Whereas the governing documents of the university are its charter and statutes and regulations. So that’s the core of the problem.”
Roseneil said the OfS policy was a “sort of libertarian, free speech absolutism” that meant universities were unable to apply rules for anything other than unlawful behaviour or speech.
“We can’t now say that we will remove or take down antisemitic or anti-Muslim propaganda because not all such propaganda is illegal,” she said.
Source: theguardian.com
