🚨 EXCLUSIVE: In 2023, David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, became one of the first academics to raise serious questions about the scholarly standards of Professor Jason Arday’s published work, shortly after Arday had been appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge. Since Arday’s death, Harris’s role in scrutinising his work and highlighting possible evidence of plagiarism has made him the target of online abuse and personal smears, including potentially defamatory public allegations that he was motivated by racism. In this interview with the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), he gives his own account of what happened, explains how he came to investigate Arday’s work, and reveals previously unreported details about his attempts to raise his concerns privately with senior figures at Cambridge. Among them was Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, whom Harris approached with detailed concerns about Arday’s scholarship. He recounts Cremin’s response, including her apology for the tone and manner of emails in which Arday threatened to report him to the police for harassment, and her invitation to Harris to visit Cambridge “for tea” to discuss their differences. But Cremin was not the only senior figure at Cambridge whom Harris approached. He reveals that he separately took his concerns to the University’s Head of Policy, Governance and Integrity, only to be told that the issues he had identified pre-dated Arday’s arrival at Cambridge and were therefore not the University’s responsibility. The interview also sheds new light on suggestions that scrutiny of Arday’s work formed part of a wider campaign against him — a “vicious campaign”, as Diane Abbott has described it. Harris is categorical that he had no contact whatsoever with Dr Nathan Cofnas, and says that his own investigation was conducted independently, privately and through conventional academic channels. His account raises important institutional questions about academic scrutiny, research integrity — and what Cambridge knew about concerns surrounding Arday’s work years before they became a matter of public controversy.

@ComAcFreedom is wanting Caius College students to get in touch - see below Please pass this on

If you have attended this 'training', the CAF would love to hear from you. @Cambridge_Uni need to wake up, fast, as do the individual colleges pushing this nonsense on undergraduates.

CAF has been looking closely at the mandatory 90-minute “inclusivity training” that all Caius undergraduates are due to receive from Stop Hate UK from next week. Some of the publicly available material raises serious questions for us — both about the accuracy with which aspects of equality law are presented, and about the line between introducing students to contested concepts and requiring them to express assent to particular ways of understanding speech and social interaction. We will be writing to Cambridge to address some of those concerns later this week, once our draft has undergone legal review. But what we don’t yet know, and what may matter considerably from a legal and regulatory perspective, is what actually happens during the training. So if you’re a Caius student attending one of these sessions, or know someone who is, CAF would be very interested to hear from you afterwards. Are there quizzes, scenarios, exercises or tick-box questions? Are some answers treated as “correct”? Can students complete the training while openly disagreeing with propositions advanced during it? Are they ever required to repeat an exercise or answer until they select the approved response? Are students given materials they can retain? How are key terms like “harassment” and “discrimination” defined, if at all? And perhaps most importantly: did the training affect how willing you felt to contribute to discussions of difficult or contentious subjects afterwards? You can DM us via X, use the ‘get in touch’ function on our website, or email us directly at manager@afcomm.org.uk. Screenshots or contemporaneous notes would also be very useful. We’re happy to treat approaches in confidence. @theasewell05 @MaeveHalligan @lottietredgett @Fox_Claire @ProfAliceS @drianpace @astor_charlie

Scholars at Risk’s (SAR’s) latest Free to Think report documents 382 attacks on scholars, students and universities across 59 countries in just one year: 165 killings, violent attacks and disappearances, 63 cases of wrongful imprisonment or prosecution, 50 involving loss of academic positions or threats of the same, and 93 other attacks, including political interference with institutional and curricular autonomy. It is a rigorously evidenced account of deteriorating conditions for academic freedom around the world. But sobering as those figures are, they can capture only part of the damage. As SAR readily concedes, its figures represent “only a fraction” of the attacks that take place — and as CAF's own casework suggests, there are attacks... and then there is the threat of one. How, for instance, do you count the academics who never report a breach of their free speech rights for fear of professional repercussions? Or the chilling effects of an intellectually and ideologically conformist campus culture that leave no incident to record at all: the lecture never given, the research question never proposed, the intervention never articulated? In our experience, for every case that becomes visible, there are at least half a dozen others in which an academic decides that the safest course is simply to keep their head down, keep quiet and keep the monthly salary coming in. Full story: afcomm.org.uk/2026/09/29/det…

Another important piece of work by CAF to protect freedom of speech within the law. One of the UK’s leading professional bodies has amended its Code of Conduct after adopting our recommendations in full, following a constructive process of engagement over concerns that its harassment provisions inadvertently risked restricting lawful expression. Full credit to the Royal Microscopical Society for engaging so positively with the concerns we raised and acting on them. Full story here: afcomm.org.uk/2026/09/17/roy… If you are worried that your organisation’s policies or training materials risk encouraging an over-broad approach to harassment, protected belief or lawful professional disagreement, please get in touch at manager@afcomm.org.uk.

Last week, CAF published an audit of the 20 English Russell Group universities. We found that only 5 of the 37 staff grievance and disciplinary procedures we could verify, and only 7 of 20 free-speech codes of practice, were advertising the new OfS Free Speech Complaints Scheme — despite the regulator itself saying that providers should advertise the scheme in these and other similar documents. Getting these numbers up is important, because the scheme will only be as effective as the cases that reach it. If the pipeline is restricted because the route is poorly advertised, quite apart from the impact on individual academics, there is a wider danger that the university lobby will point to low complaint numbers as evidence that there was never much of a campus free-speech problem in the first place, and that the scheme is an unnecessary waste of money. The OfS has given providers until 1 January 2027 to get this right. But, just in case any of them forget to remember, we’ve been looking for other ways to put pressure on them to do the right thing. With that in mind, CAF has now responded to Acas’s consultation on its new statutory Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures. We’ve proposed a new principle requiring employers, where a relevant statutory or regulatory complaints mechanism exists, to take reasonable steps to signpost workers to authoritative information about it. If adopted, that would give universities a potentially significant financial incentive to get this right. An unreasonable failure to signpost the OfS scheme in a grievance or disciplinary process engaging an academic’s freedom of speech or academic freedom could then contribute to an uplift of up to 25% if that dispute subsequently deteriorates into a qualifying Employment Tribunal claim. Our full analysis of how the 20 English Russell Group universities are currently advertising the OfS scheme is here: afcomm.org.uk/2026/09/14/new…

CAF has instructed a leading employment law firm to act for an Emeritus Professor after the University of Sunderland warned him to “reflect carefully” on his lawful online interventions on assisted dying — leaving him fearing that further public comment on an issue directly related to his academic expertise could put his institutional status at risk. Read the full story: afcomm.org.uk/2026/08/29/caf…

CAF has today submitted Freedom of Information requests to 130 UK universities, seeking to establish the extent to which aggressive legal threats from wealthy individuals, companies and other powerful interests may be inhibiting academic research. Why now? Earlier this month, MPs debated the need for universal anti-SLAPP legislation. The House formally recognised the threat that Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) pose to “public interest research”, while Courts Minister Sarah Sackman identified cases involving “academic research” among those falling outside the UK’s existing statutory protections. That’s good news. While SLAPPs are most commonly associated with attempts to intimidate journalists and campaigners, there are well-documented cases in which academics and publishers have faced similar legal pressure over their work. Two Private Members’ Bills now seek to extend anti-SLAPP protection beyond its existing narrow focus on economic crime. The Government is working with both sponsors, and the Telegraph has reported that it is expected to back Sir John Whittingdale’s Bill, due for second reading on 27 November. As a member of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, CAF wants to establish what legal pressure on academic research actually looks like across UK higher education, and ensure that the Government’s welcome recognition of the problem is carried through into the legislation that emerges. Institutional records can reveal only part of the picture, however — which is why we also want to hear from you. Some legal threats may be handled privately by academics, sometimes with the assistance of a trade union or publisher, without ever reaching a university’s central legal office. In other cases, the threat of ruinously expensive litigation may cause research to be narrowed, abandoned or left unpublished long before proceedings are issued. So if you have faced legal threats over your academic work — or if concern about possible litigation has affected what you researched, wrote or published — please contact us confidentially at manager@afcomm.org.uk.

That’s impressive. Well done you and the Royal Microscopical Society. Hope you are looking into the Royal Society of Chemistry’s publication policy - they need your help!

Conflict on Campus, a one-day event taking place in central Edinburgh on 21 October, will bring together academics, lawyers and senior university figures to discuss how Scottish higher education can respond constructively to conflict and disagreement on campus. Speakers include Professor Arif Ahmed, Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the @officestudents, leading employment, discrimination and human rights barrister @akuareindorf KC, and CAF Advisory Board member Professor Alice Sullivan (@ProfAliceS). The programme will examine the purpose of the university, feature first-hand accounts from those who have seen universities struggle to uphold open inquiry in the face of internal and external pressures, and include reflections from senior leaders on handling contentious issues. Interactive workshops will focus on #academicfreedom, and on protest and disruption. The event is aimed particularly at academics, university leaders, staff responsible for conduct and speaker events, EDI leads and student union representatives. A limited number of subsidised tickets are available for £55, including lunch and refreshments. Further details and booking are available via Eventbrite: eventbrite.co.uk/e/conflict-…

Are you referring to Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley who privately (and politely) raised concerns with Cambridge over plagiarism back in 2023? Or the 97-page dossier detailing extensive plagiarism in his PhD thesis that I submitted in September 2025? Both of these approaches were entirely legitimate, I would argue

🧵A UCL biology student emailed me on behalf of a UCL student group asking why I signed the letter supporting Cofnas’ academic freedom, given some think he holds v problematic views. I replied that i signed the letter because I agreed with the contents. And…

This witch hunt is so ridiculous and disgusting.