University of Sussex fined £585,000 by Office for Students

[OhBuggerandArse]

The inquiry in the wake of Kathleen Stock's experience has finally been completed:

'An English university is set to be fined a record £585,000 over allegations it failed to uphold free speech and academic freedom, in a landmark ruling in the debate over student rights on campus. England’s higher education regulator found “significant and serious breaches” of free speech and governance issues at the University of Sussex, according to a draft press release seen by the Financial Times. The Office for Students press release, to be published on Wednesday, said policies intended to prevent abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus had created “a chilling effect” that might cause staff and students to “self-censor”.'

Sussex 'has reacted furiously...'

https://www.ft.com/content/d39f0db7-877a-4cf3-8c12-dd5581eecd0b?fbclid=IwY2xjawJP_1RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVWF1ZXM3cKbxGAvtKfecgeMyAXNae5933M9a3dru0zohKTe7Vk24foIeA_aem_HpdtsUQc6ipMGY9J5AGFWQ

'Hines has been at Leeds for quite some time; she got her PhD in 2004 at Leeds, in the department where she’s now a professor, for a thesis entitled “Transgender Identities, Intimate Relationships and Practices of Care“. Her PhD was supervised by Fiona Williams and Sasha Roseneil (Roseneil is now Dean of the Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences (SHS) at UCL. “Sasha’s background also includes 16 years at the University of Leeds where she established and directed the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, now considered a world leading centre in the field.”)'

If you have no money, then appealling is either because you have nothing to lose and you are utterly fucked if you have to pay or because you are utterly fucked in the head and are prepared to lose everything because you've totally lost your mind.

While I’m very very happy to see the scale of this fine, like Marie & Red I’m seething at the mere suggestion that it woz Trump and Vance wot won it. We cannot let this narrative take hold, when it’s the work of work of women chipping away bit by bit and funding every step with small, but important donations. Not to mention the sheer hell that KS and so many other brave women have gone through.

I wish I knew the nitty-gritty about what happened between 2021 and 2022 at Sussex.

I know that in 2021 the then VC publicly stated his support for Stock/academic freedom:

The University of Sussex's vice chancellor has defended a professor after protesters tried to have her sacked for her views on gender identity.
Staff "have an untrammelled right to say and believe what they think," Adam Tickell told BBC News.
The university is investigating the incidents, and will take disciplinary action if necessary, Vice Chancellor Prof Adam Tickell told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday.
University of Sussex backs professor in free speech row

That seems like a good response, and supportive of Stock. I can't imagine the current VC saying that.

What I don't know is how Tickell followed up on what he said - did he/the uni take any disciplinary action?

I would also like to know why Tickell left.

The interview with the BBC was in late 2021; the current VC took over in 2022 - what happened in between? Was Tickell leaving anyway, or did his pro-free-speech response hasten his departure? Was Roseneil chosen because she would never say anything like
'staff have an untrammelled right to say and believe what they think'?

A PP said Tickell is now at Birmingham - I wonder how that's going? Is he upholding free speech and academic freedom there?

What happens to the £585k? - you can run quite a lot of lecture courses for that amount! It would be nice if it could be donated to other universities that don't discriminate, but doubtless it will disappear into general government funds and students will lose out.

£585k really isn't a huge amount of money for a university I'm afraid, they're expensive places to run. It's a smallish research grant, or 3 times the nominal cost of an international PhD studentship (explanation deleted because it was more info than you want while still not being completely accurate!). Point is, universities deal in large numbers and this isn't one, on that scale. Clearly large enough to have touched a nerve though, which is good!

Critical of gender because Stock taught “women’s studies” and women are her expertise.

maybe Sussex should get a trans studies dept going and they can teach what they like about gender ….

This is very heartening for those of us working in universities.

I'd love to see how Sussex frame their appeal; are they really going to claim that Prof Stock's essays were bullying and harassment of the most marginalised?

The UK Reddit view - so much clueless, prejudiced bollocks being spouted about Kathleen Stock, and people claiming “deplatforming works” pointing to the Reddit site itself as a great example 😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/7Yh4X4UhUX

This caught my eye - The current Sussex VC's PhD supervisee [is that a word??] had an 'exchange of views' with Doc Stock on Women's Hour in 2018

Not directly linked to Doc Stock's treatment at Sussex of course, and a PhD supervisor does not necessarily agree with her supervisee of course, but Hines expresses the same beliefs as Stock's persecutors.

Update on 19 Nov 2018: after her appearance on Woman’s Hour in a conversation with Dr Kathleen Stock (very ably moderated by Jane Garvie) it became painfully obvious that Hines doesn’t understand the difference between “sex” and “gender”; that she hasn’t heeded the pleas of intersex people not to be used as debating points by trans activists; and most tragically, given that she has a professorial position in a Russell Group university, that she believes that “trans women are women” is a magical incantation. Sorry, Professor Hines, my abra remains resolutely un-cadabra’d.

You can listen to the Woman's Hour discussion here:
Woman's Hour - Sex and gender: Why are these words so controversial? - BBC Sounds

https://www.politicshome.com/opinion/article/ofs-investigation-into-my-university-was-flawed-kathleen-stock

Far from accepting the findings, the VC is having a proper meltdown.

@RedToothBrush @BeyondHumanKenDoll
I don’t disagree at all that free speech is fundamental! But trans extremism is not only a threat to free speech but very specifically a threat to women. Men can afford to care a lot less.

Also, I am actually in favour of reserving some spaces for female-only speech. There is value in excluding males from certain discussions.

But yes, absolutely, a university has to allow all speech within the law - but when trans bullshitters are challenged on some of their more ludicrous claims, they often use a free speech argument.

That seems unwise of her

That article is all over the place (expect better from a VC) but seems to boil down to 'they're bad and we're good'. I can't make sense of what she's trying to say at all. Beyond Tickell's statement, what did they do to protect Stock and ensure the University was a space where biological reality could be spoken out loud? Surely if there's a long list of even handed actions she could have listed them?

Also I'm not sure using the term 'kafkaesque' is wise if you believe any old bloke, including the likes of Dolatiwski or Bryson, is literally a woman as soon as he says the magic words and that women should lose their job / be horrendously bullied for still perceiving their male bodies as male.

A University allowed staff and students to hound out a woman for expressing perfectly normal, well argued and legal viewpoints. There is ZERO reflection on this in that article and no sense of remorse. I would have no confidence in the leadership if I was GC at Sussex today.

indeed - In the financial year ending 31 July 2024, Sussex had a total income of £379.6 million (2022/23 – £380.1 million) and total expenditure of £291.3 million (2022/23 – £345.1 million).

Key sources of income included £224.6 million from tuition fees and education contracts (2022/23 – £222.2 million), £37.3 million from funding body grants (2022/23 – £39.9 million), £39.9 million from research grants and contracts (2022/23 – £42 million), £7.8 million from investment income (2022/23 – £7.4 million) and £4 million from donations and endowments (2022/23 – £5.3 million).

At year end, Sussex had endowments of £21.1 million (2022/23 – £16.4 million) and total net assets of £505.5 million (2022/23 – £414.7 million).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Sussex#:~:text=In%20the%20financial%20year%20ending,23%20%E2%80%93%20%C2%A3345.1%20million).

I don't know if I'd call it a 'meltdown' - if it is true that the uni were not given a chance to respond directly to OfS, Roseneil might have a point.

But although she re-asserts Doc Stock's right to academic freedom, she also glosses over the level of harassment directed at Doc Stock - it wasn't just a few meetings and a placard or two, it was a long campaign of intimidation and harassment which ultimately caused her to leave Sussex.

So the issue may not be Roseneil's attitude to the theory of academic freedom, it's her silence regarding the outrageous way in which Doc Stock's academic freedom was thwarted in practical ways by a cross-section of the university body.

A supportive and thoughtful regulator might collaborate to identify and understand shared challenges and develop good practice on academic freedom, freedom of speech and institutional culture in relation to equalities issues. Sussex stands ready to help deliver that support, drawing on our experience over recent years.

Sussex, in the person of its VC, would have to show a lot more self-awareness and self-criticism to be able to 'help' do anything of the sort.

Also this bit.... Eventually, the OfS has found two historic breaches. One relates to a two-page statement intended to protect the welfare of transgender staff and students, and the second to the University’s way of approving a small number of documents.

So if a University has a policy that says 2+2=5 and anyone not going along with this belief should be cast out that's ok because it's the number of breaches that matters? What utter rot!

Did the 'trans welfare' policy force compelled speech and compelled belief in gender religion on staff and students? Lead to a total loss of single sex spaces, and removal of the right to recognize biological reality from staff and students, perchance? Did it cast women wanting single sex spaces as heretics and bigots and give a free pass to anyone threatening, bullying and harassing women who had sex realist views ? One policy can do a lot of harm.

Really embarrassing

She’s got nowhere else to go, has she? If she puts up her hands and says “Yup, we allowed bullying and the hounding out of staff by activists, and we run policies that give special treatment to one group over another” then she makes UoS look awful (who’d want their kids spending £9.5k a year there?) plus she’ll incur the wrath of the TRA/TRSOH crowd when they turn on her.

However, I suspect someone who is a Professor of Gender Studies hasn’t so much drunk the Kool-Aid as downed several bottles and doused herself with it before finding a large vat of it to dive into accessorised with armbands and a flowery swim hat. So we are reading the epic tantrum of someone whose fundamental beliefs are being challenged, like a toddler told they can’t have any more Haribo.

Good!

They behaved shamefully.

@SidewaysOtter. I don’t know what the appeal mechanism is. However cannot imagine lawyers would not be involved. I do think if institutions allow this sort of thing to happen, they should be fined. There’s no other way of holding them to account. Maybe some courses should be dropped when they make their redundancies?

There should be a special name for this sort of weasely, misrepresentative writing. You see rather a lot of it in the work of some academics, where they strongly imply something, but when you read it carefully they're not quite saying it, so they haven't actually been dishonest.

And while this fine isn't a fortune when measured against Sussex's total budget, firstly the budget is tight, and secondly punishment doesn't have to be harsh to really smart.

Wow. The fine was originally going to be twice as much.

So many contradictions in that melt down piece by the VC. She seems to be saying OfS investigated too much and looked at too many documents which is a very bizarre thing for an academic to say. No evidence at all for her assertion the university supported Stock. She sprays accusations of partisanship and political bias all over the place.

TLDR : she's very pissed off the OfS wasn't kind to them.

I'm giving it a C minus.

Sussex are still failing to acknowledge the treatment of Stock. This is the problem.

They are pretending there isn't an issue with trans extremism. They are trying to legitimise the treatment of Stock even now.

It's not about free speech in the sense of reasoned debate for this reason.

This is about where you cross from making an argument into harassment and abuse. This isn't as difficult to make a distinction with as even many on this thread are trying to make out.

Stock did not make death threats.
Stock did not try and hound people out of their jobs.
Stock did not individually target someone.
Stock did not do targeted harassment.

Stock just spoke the truth and said 'actually I have a problem with thought terminating cliches and actually it's a big more complex and we must acknowledge the issues relating to sex not gender'.

Something that a report has just said.

And no this isn't just relevant to women either.

Safeguarding those who identify as trans also relies on us seeing sex. Again the above mentioned report states this.

We need to acknowledge that many trans identifying people are extremely vulnerable. That INCLUDES recognising they may be vulnerable to the ideology they follow themselves. Some may desist. Others will stick with it and harms themselves because of their failure to acknowledge sex. Women who identify as trans are therefore doubly at risk but it's not exclusive to transmen.

We see a huge amount of comorbidity going on in those who identify as trans - autism, being gay, trauma, sexual abuse are all massive over represented. We know this. The Cass Review mentions this. We do young people who identify as trans a massive disservice in not recognising this. One of the features of the movement is it behaves like a cult and once you are in it, it becomes difficult to leave because of this tribalism and because someone might feel ostracised if they don't continue. There are definitely elements of coercion. There's online communities that actively supress information or the idea that transition has massive side effects and actively encourage individuals to transition in an almost competitive way. There is this idea that if you aren't being persecuted enough then you aren't authentic. These are all factors which are HUGELY relevant to young people who have left home for the first time.

Safeguarding is about identifying self harm as much as harm to others.