The law has changed. The culture hasn’t.

When the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act came into force in August 2025, universities were placed under a new legal duty to protect open debate. The regulator, the Office for Students, was given powers to intervene where institutions fall short. On paper, it looked like a turning point.

Yet the emails arriving at the Committee for Academic Freedom tell a different story. Recruitment must now be free of political litmus tests, and yet job adverts still demand a “demonstrable commitment” to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as an essential criterion. Promotion should no longer depend on adherence to particular values or ideas, and yet institutional frameworks continue to reward alignment with prevailing orthodoxies on contested questions. Academic staff cannot be pressured to endorse or reject prescribed value judgements, and yet many still feel obliged to keep certain topics off slides, sanitise reading lists, add trigger warnings, or take part in quasi-compulsory “decolonisation” projects.

It’s also true that universities are no longer routinely cancelling lawful events or denying venues to controversial speakers, with early signs suggesting they are even paying for extra security to ensure debates can go ahead. Yet beyond the lecture hall, the same patterns of intimidation persist. Student activists continue to disrupt meetings and create an atmosphere designed to force cancellations on safety grounds, deter attendance, or make those who do attend think twice about returning next time.

The effect is subtle but pervasive: a culture in which self-censorship feels safer than speaking one’s mind. The real measure of the problem on campus isn’t crude counts of cancelled events or sacked academics, but the lectures not given, projects never proposed, interventions never voiced.

CAF was founded to challenge that climate and to expose the practices that sustain it.

We defend scholars and researchers whose lawful views place them at odds with institutional orthodoxy. We bring cases of censorship and belief-based discrimination to national attention. We circulate our research to policymakers and parliamentarians, convene academics and others concerned with the future of higher education, and press universities to live up to their legal and moral obligations.

Your support enables that work — case by case, policy by policy — until academic freedom in Britain is more than a line in the statute book.