Following representations from the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), the University of Sussex has quietly amended its public-facing Prevent duty guidance after it was shown to have misstated the legal duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 – a small but significant correction touching directly on how lawful but controversial speech and academic material are interpreted, scrutinised, and managed on campus.
CAF was contacted by a member who drew our attention to a possible error in the University’s published guidance for staff, students and visitors on the Prevent duty. Having reviewed the relevant material, we wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sasha Roseneil, raising concerns about the University’s description of the Prevent duty on its webpage, “Safeguarding: Prevent Duty”. The relevant extract stated:
“[The Prevent] duty forms a key part of the Government’s Counter Terrorism and Security Act (CTSA) 2015. Universities are designated ‘specified authorities’ under the Act and must ‘in the exercise of their functions, have due regard to the need to prevent terrorism’.”
That formulation, presented in quotation marks as the statutory duty, was repeated elsewhere on the page, including in the introductory section summarising the University’s statutory responsibilities. Unfortunately, however, this does not accurately reflect section 26 of the CTSA, which provides that specified authorities must “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”.
This may sound like the kind of pooterish pedantry that, while rather jolly for policy wonks to obsess over during regulatory conferences and multi-agency stakeholder engagement symposia, has little bearing on the everyday life of a university campus. And yet the distinction really does matter. Section 26 is framed as a “due regard” duty, requiring specified authorities to give appropriate weight to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism when exercising their functions. Moreover, section 31 of the same Act makes clear that this duty is not freestanding. In carrying it out, universities must “have particular regard to the duty to ensure freedom of speech” and to “the importance of academic freedom”.
The duty, therefore, is not a general obligation to “prevent terrorism”. It is a qualified and context-sensitive duty, embedded within a broader statutory framework which requires universities to balance security considerations with their obligations to protect lawful speech. The rationale is straightforward. Various ideologies identified by government as being associated, in certain contexts, with pathways into radicalisation – for example, Islamism and strands of right-wing thought such as “cultural nationalism” – are also ideas that, in a university setting, may be the object of entirely legitimate academic inquiry, critique or debate.
This matters all the more because Sussex describes the webpage as a “transparent guide” for staff, students and visitors. In other words, it is likely to be a first port of call for members of the University community seeking to understand how the Prevent duty operates in practice. Recasting the duty as one to “prevent terrorism” risks encouraging an over-expansive reading of the University’s obligations, in which the presence or discussion of controversial ideological material is treated as a Prevent concern in itself, rather than as one factor in a contextual assessment of whether individuals are at risk of being drawn into terrorism.
The Office for Students, the English higher education regulator, has made precisely this point in Regulatory Advice 24: Guidance related to freedom of speech, warning that misstatements of legal duties in this area may restrict lawful speech, including by encouraging staff to “control or restrict reading lists”, with the result that staff may become “reluctant to set unorthodox, radical or potentially upsetting texts”.
And there are good reasons for taking that risk seriously. Over the past decade, a series of incidents has shown how readily lawful academic work can be drawn into a security-oriented frame: students warned to act with caution when engaging with an essay by a leading left-wing academic on the ethics of a socialist revolution; discussions at Glasgow School of Art about referring a student’s artwork on the geopolitics of the Middle East to Prevent teams; a criminology lecturer reporting that she had run her course reading list past the police because of concerns about its content; and a Muslim PhD student cancelling a conference on counterterrorism legislation citing fears of Prevent.
The University has now made the changes requested by CAF, correcting a public-facing guide which previously misstated the legal threshold – and campus culture will be healthier for it.
This episode sits awkwardly with Professor Roseneil’s recent criticism of the OfS following the Sussex v OfS judgment. Over the past few weeks, she has repeatedly used that ruling to argue that the “failed regulator” is “not fit for purpose”, while offering to work with government on “better” approaches to regulation that will help “support” universities.
Yet if Sussex could not accurately state a basic statutory duty in staff- and student-facing guidance, it raises obvious questions about what else may be going wrong in internal university governance, and whether Professor Roseneil’s judgments about what constitutes a regulator that is “fit for purpose” should themselves be treated with a pinch of salt.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.