The High Court has rewarded Kathleen Stock’s persecutors

The High Court has just dealt a serious blow to the ability of academics and students in English universities to express themselves freely. In a judgment handed down on Wednesday, the court upheld Sussex University’s appeal against the Office for Students (OfS) – the regulator tasked with upholding free speech – and declared a fine imposed on the university following its failure to protect gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock to be unlawful.

This long and depressing story of campus cancel culture begins in 2021. Stock resigned from her post in October of that year after being subjected to an appalling campaign of ostracism, harassment, intimidation by masked protesters and internal pressure for her dismissal. She received death threats and, for periods, was advised by police not to leave her house. She was subjected to this medieval witch hunt for refusing to bow to trans activists and her insistence that it was morally unconscionable to perform gender-reassignment surgery on minors.

Shortly after Stock’s resignation, the OfS opened an investigation into Sussex. Unable to act on behalf of an individual, it instead examined whether the university had complied with its legal obligations to uphold free speech and academic freedom.

In March 2025, three-and-a-half years after Stock quit the university, the OfS imposed a £585,000 fine on Sussex under the powers of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech Act) 2023 (HEFSA). The OfS’s target was Sussex’s ‘Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement’, which required, among other things, that course materials ‘positively represent trans people and trans lives’. The OfS concluded, not unreasonably, that such wording risked chilling lawful speech and academic freedom.

Not that Sussex saw it that way. Often described as one of Britain’s wokest universities, it hit back with a judicial review (reportedly spending more than the fine itself), which challenged the decision on almost every conceivable ground. At its core, however, was a simple claim: that this kind of policy was never within the regulator’s reach in the first place.

The ruling has now been handed down, and it makes for difficult reading for anyone concerned with freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus.

Part of the problem lies in the High Court’s restrictive interpretation of what counts as a ‘governing document’. That might sound like the sort of abstruse issue only lawyers would worry about. In practice, however, if equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies are excluded from this definition, it means the OfS will struggle to scrutinise the kinds of internal policy frameworks that have proliferated across the university sector in recent years.

Filtered through various committees and working groups, often dominated by activist staff in rainbow lanyards, these EDI policies and harassment codes are what now regulate much of what can and cannot be said on campus. The result is a whole layer of policies that, in practice, function as the ‘documents that govern’ university life will no longer be treated as ‘governing documents’ that the OfS can scrutinise.

Take Leeds University’s sweeping ‘decolonising’ programme, which requires departments to embed its principles across their academic activity. London Metropolitan University uses mandatory EDI statements in academic recruitment, requiring applicants to state what they have done to ‘advance equality’. The University of Greenwich requires academics to ‘adhere to and promote’ its EDI agenda, which includes an ‘all-faculty decolonisation of curriculum’. Policies like these, through which speech is increasingly governed, now fall outside the OfS’s ambit. The High Court judgment has effectively prevented the OfS from fulfilling its purpose.

Ominously, the ruling also resets the meaning of ‘freedom of speech within the law’. For the OfS, Sussex’s trans policy was wrong because it was capable of catching speech – namely, gender-critical views – that are perfectly lawful. But the court said this was not enough. Universities may indeed, in some circumstances, restrict lawful speech, provided the restriction is justified and proportionate, it said. Apparently, the mere fact that a policy captures lawful speech does not, by itself, put a university in breach of its duty to uphold free speech.

The danger is all too obvious for anyone familiar with the way the higher-education sector works. The fight over freedom of expression will now be pushed further into case-by-case, European Court of Human Rights-style balancing exercises – with the right to express controversial views on matters of public importance weighed against competing claims about harm, dignity, equality and the rights of others. This is precisely the terrain on which universities have long defended restrictive internal policies, and what the HEFSA was supposed to root out.

Finally, the court gives ‘academic freedom’ a dangerously narrow statutory meaning, in which the relevant threshold is whether an academic is placed in jeopardy of losing his or her job or privileges. On this point too, the OfS’s approach was found to be legally flawed.

Yet for academics like Kathleen Stock, and the many others that groups like the Committee for Academic Freedom deal with day to day, the reality is very different. Pressure rarely operates at that level. Instead, it takes softer forms – cancellation, ostracism, exclusion from opportunities and reputational damage – all of which can chill speech long before anyone is in jeopardy of losing their job.

The result is that, while the statutory duties to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech remain in place, an enormous grey area has opened up that allows speech to be restricted on campus.

Let’s hope the Office for Students appeals. If this ruling stands and confines the regulator to universities’ formal ‘governing documents’, while pushing disputes over lawful speech into case-by-case balancing against claims of ‘harm’, it will have no teeth. All we will be left with is the Office for… well, no one at all.

Freddie Attenborough is director of research for the Committee for Academic Freedom.