Office for Students’ University of Sussex humiliation is a symptom of deeper failings

In its brief and unhappy life, England’s Office for Students has been offered a series of challenges it has largely failed to meet. This week the latest and most embarrassing of those was unveiled when the high court decisively rejected the higher education watchdog’s attempts to fine the University of Sussex more than £500,000 for regulatory failings relating to Kathleen Stock’s time as an academic at Sussex. Stock quit Sussex in 2021 , saying she felt ostracised and targeted for her views on gender identity and transgender rights. Here was the highest profile test case that the OfS had seen: a subject of enormous controversy and sensitivity, involving key issues of academic freedom and freedom of speech. But as we now know from Mrs Justice Lieven’s ruling , in its rush to intervene, the OfS managed to tie together its own shoelaces. The high court hearing revealed that the OfS was eager to make an example of Sussex, to the extent that the court threw out its fine for bias and predetermination along with a string of other jurisdictional failings. Rather than teaching Sussex a lesson, it was the OfS that ended up with a bloody nose. But the damage goes deeper than that. Susan Lapworth, until recently the OfS’s chief executive, started the ball rolling in 2021 with the Sussex investigation. Nearly five years later, with nothing to show for it, the OfS is still failing to do much for the students in whose name it is meant to regulate. …