Dr Christian Beighton and Dr Zahid Naz explore the concept of free speech within higher education, professional regulation and a post-truth world.

A recent judgement by the Office for Students (OfS), which regulates higher education the UK, is causing concern for both institutions and students. Having fined the University of Sussex an unprecedented £585,000 for breaching its rules on academic freedom, the OfS has once again evoked the “chilling” tension between free speech and the need to protect everyone from hate speech, harassment, and worse on university campuses.

Having drawn attention to the less obvious aspects of this debate in previous posts, whether this development constitutes tragedy or farce in open to question. An important detail of the OfS’s judgment, and one which is causing Sussex to consider an appeal, is the evidence used by the regulator. As the OfS says, the failings in questions relate specifically to the “governing documents” used by the university’s “management and governance processes”. These proxies are important, but they are nonetheless representations of things rather than things themselves. This choice to distance themselves, Sussex have argued, is proof that the OfS has “dug in” and been “so unwilling to engage”.

There may be good reasons for this distance, surveillance by proxy is hardly a new phenomenon, but we have been drawing attention to its most recent manifestations in publications which identify  the way in which real events and potentially dangerous practices lose ground to their “semiotised” proxies (Beighton and Revell, 2020). This leads to a phenomenon we call “documentisation” (Naz and Beighton, 2023), or the transformation of stuff into paperwork-about-stuff and the bureaucratic dust-devil that ensues.  In other words, when a parallel world of tick boxes, regulations and paperwork takes on a life of its own, watch out for the fallout from these “brutal forms and formalities” (Naz and Beighton, 2024).

In our most recent publication (Beighton and Naz, 2025) we extend this approach to the way professional practice is evidenced and documented. We see a similar shift towards the regulation of how things are said, and away from what is actually done. This sleight of hand is in itself interesting, but, we argue, has deep implications for how we understand, promote and regulate things such as professionalism, teaching and research. Given the widespread concerns about a post-truth world constructed on alternative facts, individual truths and unaccountable beliefs, an account of how such truths come to be and how they pertain – if at all – to anything remotely real is surely worthwhile. The danger here, as some institutions would doubtless argue, is that significant aspects of the HE experience risk being regulated based on a conflation of the word and the world: what is said and what is done are not interchangeable, and the ability of powerful organisations to oversee provision as if they were is central to this whole debate. As the historian Paul Veyne reminds us “what is held to be true will be obeyed”. And as our post-truth world is showing, that’s really chilling.

Dr Christian Beighton is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Educational Studies, and Dr Zahid Naz is Senior Lecturer in Academic and Professional Education at Queen Mary University.