Students at one of Cambridge University’s oldest colleges are being required to attend “inclusivity training” delivered by a charity whose published educational materials misstate key provisions of equality law and treat contested ideas such as “micro-inequities” not as proper subjects of academic inquiry but as settled norms for regulating conduct, with potentially chilling consequences for lawful speech.
In an email sent from its Education and Tutorial Office, Caius College states that the 90-minute course will be run by Stop Hate UK, a charity which describes its mission as working to “combat prejudice and Hate” and “to educate towards a Hate free society” – although of course no amount of capitalisation can turn “Hate” itself into a freestanding category of unlawful conduct.
The training is set to run from the start of the academic term, in the week commencing 5 October, and will provide “awareness of the range of protected characteristics”, a clear reference to the statutory characteristics around which the Equality Act 2010 constructs its protections against discrimination and, where applicable, other prohibited conduct.
Any legal inaccuracies or omissions in Stop Hate UK’s material are therefore all the more serious, since Caius is not merely directing students towards an external resource they might choose to consult, but compelling them to attend training which places a statutory concept – protected characteristics – at the heart of a broader programme intended to teach them how to recognise hate incidents and demonstrate “inclusive behaviours”.
“All the more serious” in that an unduly expansive account of equality law – of what it protects and what it prohibits – necessarily alters the boundary students understand the law to draw around permissible speech and expression. Put simply, the more that is presented as unlawful discrimination, the less that appears to remain available for legitimate disagreement. And in a university, where robust argument around precisely these questions is an ordinary part of academic life, getting that boundary right matters.
In such circumstances, Caius, as a constituent college of Cambridge, should be extremely wary of adopting equality-law training that fails to reach the level of precision required to convey what is a complex statutory scheme. Unfortunately, on the materials we have seen, Stop Hate UK falls short of that standard.
One of the most glaring omissions in the charity’s educational materials is age, which disappears altogether from Stop Hate UK’s list of protected characteristics under section 4 of the Equality Act. Given the frequency with which age discrimination is itself identified as a persistent social problem, it is a curious omission for a charity dedicated to combating discrimination, and particularly so in higher education, where age can have an impact – dare we say… an “intersectional” impact – on the treatment of mature students and older academics, as well as on decisions about admissions, appointments and promotion.
Equally troubling is the way those same materials substitute the much broader concept of “gender identity” for the statutory protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”. “Gender identity” is not one of the nine protected characteristics named in the Act. Section 7 instead protects a person who is “proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex”.
Why would that matter if it finds its way into the Caius training? Because whereas gender reassignment is a statutory characteristic defined by reference to an ascertainable process, “gender identity” is also a theoretical concept whose meaning, existence and significance are themselves matters of legitimate intellectual dispute. Indeed, questions about what gender identity means, whether it describes a coherent or universal phenomenon, how it relates to biological sex, whether it should take precedence over biological sex in public policy, and what weight it should carry in social and institutional life are exactly the kinds of questions that high-calibre undergraduates and postgraduates at a university such as Cambridge should be free to critically interrogate.
And whatever criticisms trans-rights activists may wish to make of the law as it now stands, the fact is that the legal position on this particular point could hardly be clearer. In For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers [2025], the Supreme Court held that the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act have their biological meaning. Gender-critical belief, including the belief that sex is immutable and should not be conflated with gender identity, is meanwhile capable of qualifying as a protected philosophical belief under section 10 of the Act, following Forstater v CGD Europe.
If repeated in the Caius training, this presentation of “gender identity” as though it were itself a protected characteristic risks giving students – particularly the more censorious among their number – the impression that one of the most contested concepts in contemporary academic and public life enjoys a legal status which Parliament simply hasn’t given it.
It’s not necessarily that any complaint submitted on the basis of such a misunderstanding of the law would be accepted by Caius (or at least you’d hope not). But even the most cursory of investigations – having a complaint made against you by a peer, potentially being required to explain yourself or being drawn into an institutional procedure – is not exactly cost-free, and can itself become part of the burden attached to speaking freely.
Even in the absence of any formal complaint, students who believe that disagreement with “gender identity” trespasses upon a legally protected characteristic may feel correspondingly emboldened to treat dissent not simply as an intellectual disagreement but as a form of prohibited or illegitimate conduct, with all the social consequences – denunciation, exclusion, ostracism or pressure – that tend to follow in the wake of such intolerance.
But the problem isn’t confined to concepts which Stop Hate UK wrongly present as statutory. Elsewhere, the movement runs in the opposite direction, with non-statutory concepts appearing in the charity’s educational materials as categories through which people are encouraged to understand and judge social conduct.
Consider, for instance, the suggestion in the College’s initial email that the training is intended to secure a “collective and unified response”. In an educational setting, where students have a right to freedom of speech within the law and where questioning and testing received wisdom is, you know, sort of the point, the obvious question is what, exactly, students are expected to “unify” around and, perhaps most crucially, how that unity will be evidenced during the mandatory training.
The Office for Students’ Regulatory Advice 24: Guidance related to freedom of speech draws a precise distinction here. Universities may require students to attend training which itself advances positions with which they disagree. What they should not do is “require training or induction that imposes a requirement on the person completing the training actively to endorse any viewpoint or value-judgement” – something the regulator rightly describes as “compelled speech within training”.
Is this what’s happening here? Stop Hate UK’s own materials currently include two particularly relevant categories: first, “microaggressions”, defined as “everyday, common, subtle, intentional or unintentional comments, behaviours or environment [sic] that communicate negative, hostile or derogatory attitudes towards a culturally marginalised or stigmatised group”; and, second, the even broader category of “micro-inequities”, which may be conveyed through “facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, choice of words”.
These are essentially sociological concepts – and that’s fine. Scholars working within particular theoretical traditions, including strands of critical and critical-race scholarship, are perfectly entitled to find them useful, think through them and apply them in their work. But the concepts are not neutral descriptions of independently existing categories of conduct. They are themselves ways of theorising and interpreting social interaction, open to precisely the same processes of criticism, empirical testing and theoretical disagreement as other concepts in the social sciences. A change in tone, a facial expression or a choice of words might be understood through a Goffmanian account of face-work and impression management, a Bourdieusian analysis of habitus and social position, the sequential analysis of talk and embodied interaction found in conversation analysis, or any number of other perspectives. The point is not that any one of these accounts must be correct, simply that the social meaning of an interaction is not self-evidently given by the interaction itself.
In other words, there is a fundamental difference between teaching students that a concept exists, explaining the bodies of scholarship in which it has been developed and applied, and even advancing arguments in its favour, and, on the other hand, requiring students to adopt that concept as the correct description of social reality or the proper standard by which their own and others’ conduct should be judged.
Nor is narrowing the realm of interpretive possibility in that way without real-world effects. A supervision, workshop session or seminar dealing with contentious questions about sex, race, Israel/Palestine, antisemitism or Islamophobia will inevitably involve disagreements over words and concepts, changes in tone, visible expressions of scepticism or disbelief and, sometimes, offence. Teaching students in advance to interpret such subtle and potentially ambiguous features of social interaction through a settled, unproblematic vocabulary of “microaggressions” and “micro-inequities”, rather than as interactions whose meaning and function may themselves be open to interpretation, is liable to make some students more reluctant to express themselves freely, while encouraging others to police those expressions in their peers.
All of which brings us back to Caius’s promised “collective and unified response”. Are students simply going to be introduced to these concepts, or will they be expected to demonstrate the promised “collective and unified response” by accepting their premises – perhaps, for instance, by identifying prescribed scenarios as “microaggressions” or “micro-inequities”, selecting approved responses, demonstrating their “understanding” by reciting an approved formulation in front of their peers, ticking boxes before being allowed to move on, or otherwise giving the “correct” answer before the training is complete?
At the moment, what we know is that Stop Hate UK offers training for schools, colleges and universities built around such concepts, including a 90-minute course on “microaggressions” using terminology, case studies and scenario-based learning. So the Committee for Academic Freedom would, to put it mildly, be very interested to hear from Caius students required to complete the training about what, if anything, they are required to assent to. (You can contact us here).
Taken as a whole, the fact that Caius chose to hire a charity with publicly-facing materials of this kind points to a troubling inversion of the academic relationship in UK higher education – one all too familiar to CAF from similar training materials sent to us by academics and students at institutions across the country.
Traditionally, the function of a university has been to teach students to think critically and reflexively about concepts: What does a “microaggression” or “micro-inequity” mean? From what theoretical traditions do these concepts emerge? What evidence supports them? What criticisms have been made of them? What competing accounts exist? At Caius, as at so many institutions, contested concepts originating within particular strands of academic and activist discourse are in grave danger of being taken out of the realm of inquiry, black-boxed as “facts”, and deployed instead as resources for instructing students how they ought to think, behave and interact.
Let us hope, then, that when Stop Hate UK arrives at Caius, its version of “inclusivity training” still finds time to teach students how to question contested ideas, rather than requiring them to attend sessions in which those same ideas are presented as settled resources for regulating how they and their peers think, speak and interact.
What is strange, frustrating – slightly dispiriting, even – is that we should have to wonder about any of this at all. After all, it’s not as if universities haven’t had ample warning of the perils of outsourcing training of this kind to third-party campaign organisations, not least from the controversies surrounding schemes such as Stonewall’s – with the result, as Akua Reindorf KC once put it, that policy comes to state “the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”.
Is it incompetence or ideological alignment that keeps these institutions from mending their ways? As it happens, there is a remarkably simple way for Caius and others to rule out the former: when mandating training which purports to teach students about complex aspects of equality law while engaging equally complex questions of freedom of speech, why not have the content put together for you by politically committed charities independently reviewed by lawyers who specialise in, er, complex aspects of equality law and complex questions of freedom of speech?