In March 2025, the Office for Students (OfS) fined the University of Sussex £585,000, the highest amount ever levied by the regulator. This was largely because after a three-and-a-half-year investigation, which the University’s vice-chancellor Professor Sasha Roseneil described as “Kafkaesque”, the OfS had decreed that the University’s Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement (hereafter the Policy Statement), which sought to protect the rights of trans and non-binary people in the University, breached the institution’s regulatory requirement to uphold freedom of speech and protect academic freedom. Continue reading