The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has written to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson MP and the Office for Students seeking urgent clarification about how free speech and academic freedom will be protected in the Government’s forthcoming guidance on external speakers and events under the Prevent duty.
The intervention follows reports that at least 12 UK universities, including eight Russell Group institutions, have paid a private intelligence firm, Horus Security, more than £440,000 since 2022 to monitor staff and student social media and conduct background checks and counter-terror “threat assessments” relating to academics and invited speakers. Several of the reported cases centred on pro-Palestine activism and events linked to the conflict in Gaza.
According to a joint investigation by Al Jazeera and Liberty Investigates, much of the disclosed activity concerns the surveillance of student protest activity, which is troubling in itself. But some of the most striking findings concern the handling of academic events, and the extent to which lawful but contentious scholarship is increasingly being drawn into a securitised framework in which the distinction between speech and action – long central to free speech protections – begins to erode, with ideas approached less as arguments to be contested than as indicators of future extremism.
One of the clearest examples concerns Manchester Metropolitan University. Emails between the university and Horus show that MMU asked for a counter-terror “threat assessment” of Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, a Palestine studies scholar at San Francisco State University, ahead of a memorial lecture she had been invited to deliver in honour of British student Tom Hurndall, who was killed by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2003.
The resulting report examined Abdulhadi’s social media activity and revisited historic allegations made against her, including claims previously dismissed by her home institution and by a US federal judge. Abdulhadi later said she had been unaware of the threat assessment, adding: “You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty […] but they actually made an assumption of guilt and started investigating me because of my scholarship.”
In some cases, including MMU, universities cited the statutory Prevent duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which requires them to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. But that duty is not freestanding. Section 31 of the same Act requires universities, when carrying out the Prevent duty, to have “particular regard” to freedom of speech and to the importance of academic freedom.
The reason for that safeguard is straightforward. Various ideologies identified within Prevent-related frameworks as being associated, in certain contexts, with pathways into radicalisation – ranging from Islamism to strands of right-wing thought such as “cultural nationalism” – may also, within a university setting, be the object of entirely legitimate academic inquiry, critique or debate. Yet the recent disclosures raise troubling questions about how lawful speech is increasingly being approached under the Prevent duty within higher education.
The need to preserve that statutory balance becomes all the more pressing in light of the Government’s Protecting What Matters paper, which indicates that the Department for Education will issue new non-statutory guidance on external speakers and events under the Prevent duty. According to the document, universities will be given “principles” to “help… assess when speech… is lawful but could enable a ‘permissive environment’ for radicalising influences”.
CAF’s letter warns that it is not clear how those principles are to be articulated in a way that preserves the statutory balance between Prevent, free speech and academic freedom. Once translated into institutional policies, training materials and speaker-event procedures, a phrase such as “permissive environment” could easily drift from a contextual, evidence-based concept into a much looser rationale for precautionary restrictions on lawful but controversial speech. The concern is that the practical threshold may gradually shift from a relatively narrow focus on individuals being drawn into terrorism towards a broader and more speculative concern with atmospheres, pathways and ideological climates within which lawful speech takes place.
That might seem far-fetched, but there is a close analogy here with harassment training. Universities have, over time, developed forms of training that purport to reflect section 26 of the Equality Act 2010, yet have in practice often reduced harassment to a perception-led standard, detached from the statutory requirements of context and reasonableness, with predictable consequences for over-reporting and the chilling of lawful expression, including protected beliefs.
Seen in that light, the recent disclosures about universities turning to companies like Horus (and other private intelligence providers) are troubling not only for what they reveal in the present, but for what they suggest about the direction of travel: a university sector in which digital surveillance, outsourced intelligence-gathering and a lowered threshold for intervention increasingly converge around lawful but controversial speech.
That is why CAF has urged the Government to ensure that the forthcoming guidance contains robust procedural and evidential safeguards where universities rely on third-party intelligence reports or counter-terror “threat assessments” in relation to academic events and invited speakers. The letter asks whether universities will be expected to demonstrate that private intelligence providers are competent to distinguish between specific Prevent-related risks and other forms of institutional concern, including reputational sensitivity, political controversy, protest activity, or the lawful but contentious nature of the speech itself.
CAF has also asked the OfS to consider strengthening its monitoring arrangements so that universities report the introduction or expansion of outsourced threat-assessment processes in external speaker decision-making, and so that regulators are better able to track whether third-party intelligence assessments are influencing rates of speaker approvals, conditional approvals or rejections across the sector.
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.
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