The College Stasi Files III: Carry On Compliance

Long-time readers of the Daily Sceptic with good memories, particularly connoisseurs of bureaucratic noir, who form such a distinguished part of its readership, may recall my previous encounters with the ideological custodians of King’s College London.

For those joining us late, a brief recap.

Back in 2018-19, while serving as Head of the Department of War Studies, I committed the sin of believing that universities should be places where people with different opinions are permitted to air their views. I organised a speaker series, ‘Endangered Speeches: Debating the Culture Wars‘, which allowed independent voices from across the thought spectrum to make their case and defend their ideas.

Despite passing off without incident, this reckless experiment in intellectual pluralism led to a sequence of events involving student activists, a barely literate petition to get a speaker cancelled (republished here again here for the continued, thoroughly deserved, humiliation of the signatories), managerial panic, emergency meetings and secret denunciations that I was “playing into the strategy of provocation by the Right”.

Compounding this offence, a few months later I co-authored an essay with my colleague, Professor David Betz, warning that events in Britain in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum were contributing to social insatiability that over the longer term threatened civil conflict. The article drew upon observable trends, statistical evidence and a substantial body of academic literature, including my own research.

This drew further accusations of ideological deviance, including that I was being “conspiratorial”, “inflammatory” and “clearly against liberal democracy”. Apparently, I didn’t know what I was talking about because I wasn’t an expert on the topic, despite being an expert on the topic. Curiously, the possibility that we might simply have been describing an emerging reality never crossed the minds of our accusers. It was much easier to diagnose the authors with an advanced case of ideological degeneracy.

Anyway, through the usual combination of activist management and colleagues whose attachment to academic freedom turned out to be considerably less durable than their attachment to career self-preservation, I was compelled to step down early from my role as head of department.

Several years later, assisted by the Committee for Academic Freedom and the Free Speech Union, I applied for a Subject Access Request to discover what exactly had happened behind the scenes.

For an institution whose official purpose is the production and dissemination of knowledge it proved surprisingly difficult to extract any meaningful kind of information.

My first Subject Access Request produced what I called my College Stasi File: a 60-page PDF consisting largely of black rectangles. Less a documentary record than a modernist artwork exploring themes of secrecy, anxiety, narcissism and toner consumption. The fragments that remained visible, however, revealed a paranoid institutional culture in which advocating academic freedom was treated much as a medieval village might have treated witchcraft, albeit with more committees, more paperwork and fewer procedural safeguards.

The sheer egregiousness of the college’s response made it hard for King’s to resist a formal challenge to their handling of my case. With due reluctance, it was agreed to do a second search, which was, if anything even more inept, thereby providing a valuable reminder that ineptitude, like excellence, can flourish when supported by the right institutional culture.

By that stage I had ceased regarding the exercise as an information retrieval process and started viewing it as a form of surreal comedy. King’s appeared to be engaged in a competition with itself to see whether its second response could be even more absurd than the first, complete with furious redactions of material that was already in the public domain. Very little made sense. Evidently, one was dealing with an institution determined to lend empirical support to the crisis of competency thesis.

The revelations were sufficiently striking that the Free Speech Union decided to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request on my behalf. The FSU’s formidable Dr Lynsey Metcalfe – part academic, part killer shark – pursued the case with a level of determination usually associated with apex predators or tax inspectors. King’s never stood a chance.

My Subject Access Requests had already confirmed that King’s treats freedom of expression rather like a difficult elderly relative who was once convicted for shoplifting: impossible to disown entirely, awkward to be seen with in public and best discussed as little as possible. The aim of the FOI request, therefore, was to get to the root of the college’s underlying attitudes to academic freedom. After all, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Shitij Kapur, made a great deal of noise in an article in the Telegraph about how “Universities have shown good faith, and put in significant resources to proactively champion these freedoms and will continue to do so.“

Well then. Let us examine these significant resources.

The FOI request asked some straightforward questions.

• What did King’s do to promote freedom of expression?
• How much did it spend on academic freedom initiatives?
• How many staff had been trained in freedom of expression?
• How many academics had been investigated over speech-related matters?
• How many had faced disciplinary processes connected to issues of academic freedom?

In short, what did the institution look like when viewed not through internal emails and secret denunciations, but through its own official records?

What came back was fascinating. There were no black rectangles this time or missing pages, or mysteriously truncated documents. Instead, there were tables, figures, categories, spending allocations, governance structures and carefully drafted responses.

By the time I reached the end of the document, however, I found myself experiencing the same sensation I had after reading my College Stasi file. Once again, I was obliged to confront an institution whose capacity for self-mockery surpassed my already high expectations. If the Subject Access Requests had exposed a mentality, the Freedom of Information response exposed a system.

The figures that refused to cooperate

The system reveals itself in the figures. They perform the useful service of translating Professor Kapur’s mangled prose about devoting “significant resources” to academic freedom from the language of the university press release into a proposition that can actually be measured.

The FOI response relayed that £776,000 had been spent on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives during the five-year period covered by the request. Over roughly the same period, it spent £4,547 producing a Freedom of Expression e-learning training module.

More than 8,000 members of staff completed EDI training. At the time the figures were supplied, only 286 had enrolled in the so-called Freedom of Expression module.

So, just to put that in perspective. As of financial year 2024-25, KCL employed 9,716 full-time equivalent members of staff. If my arithmetic is correct, that works out at about 46 pence per employee spent on cultivating an appreciation of academic freedom.

Evidently, 46 pence per employee is sufficient in Prof Kapur’s mind to qualify as a significant institutional commitment.

Thus, one of two things must be true. Either “significant resources” has been fully deconstructed from its previous meaning, or Professor Kapur believes that mathematics is a problematic legacy of Western colonialism whose claims to objectivity should no longer be privileged over alternative ways of knowing.

By contrast, around £80 per employee was spent on Endless Diversity Indoctrination. For those who enjoy this sort of thing, that represents a spending differential of approximately 17,000%. Put differently, for every pound spent encouraging freedom of expression, roughly £171 was spent on Equality, Dogma and Ideology.

If actions speak louder than words, then KCL’s budget speaks louder still.

Some priorities are more equal than others

The statistics tell us all we need to know about the college’s institutional priorities and, more importantly, about the intellectual assumptions that lie behind them.

Every organisation develops a hierarchy of concerns. They shape policies, absorb management attention and generate committees, training programmes and budget allocations

The figures suggest that EDI has ceased to be merely a programme. It has become an institutional worldview, complete with its own budgets, bureaucracies, training regimes and moral vocabulary. Academic freedom, by contrast, appears to survive largely as a compliance requirement and an occasional press release.

You only need click on the webpages of my former departmental home, the Department of War Studies, to see the consequences. Diversity and inclusion looms large. War itself rather less so. The department still mentions war much the same way that marine biology departments occasionally mention fish.

Freedom of Expression, by contrast, receives no mention whatsoever on the departmental webpages or anywhere else of the College website, which of course provides a further clue to where it stands in the university hierarchy. At best, the figures indicate an obligation grudgingly being discharged rather than a conviction being pursued.

The management of freedom

The Freedom of Expression e-learning module appeared in September 2025 as part of what the College describes as “enhanced governance”. That phrase itself is highly revealing. There was a time when universities spoke about intellectual freedom in the language of principle. Today they increasingly discuss it in the language of administration as though it were a troublesome health and safety obligation.

That is not a semantic distinction. Universities once justified free expression because it was essential to the pursuit of knowledge. The argument was philosophical before it was procedural. One defended freedom of expression because one believed that truth emerged through challenge, disagreement and the testing of assumptions. Contemporary institutions increasingly approach the subject from the opposite direction. Free expression becomes something to be managed, governed and monitored rather than extolled and practiced.

If one were inclined to stretch credulity, one might attribute the introduction of the Freedom of Expression module to a sudden burst of institutional enthusiasm for free speech. The coincidence with growing regulatory scrutiny because of the enactment of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, no doubt being entirely accidental.

Ultimately, though, one comes away with the distinct impression that King’s mistakes compliance for commitment. Reporting categories, governance arrangements, training modules and audit trails are treated as evidence that something is being defended. Whether the underlying principle is actually believed is a secondary consideration.

Of course, no institution is going to admit that it has confused bureaucracy with conviction. It doesn’t need to. Budgets possess a candour that official statements often lack.

Information not held

The most illuminating phrase in KCL’s response is “no information is held”. The wording recurs throughout so frequently that one is minded to think it should replace the College’s Latin motto, Sancte et Sapienter (With Holiness and Wisdom). Of the two formulations, at least Informationem Non Habemus survives prolonged contact with the documentary record.

How many members of staff have undergone disciplinary processes due to alleged speech violations? Information not held.

How many academics have been dismissed because of issues relating to course content? Information not held.

What changes were made to policies and procedures following major legal judgments concerning sex and gender? Information not held.

At first sight it sounds innocuous. The College is not refusing to answer the questions. Nor is it claiming exemption or invoking confidentiality. It is explaining that the relevant information is not available in a form that permits disclosure. One can almost hear the administrative ‘Computer says no’ shrug. The more one reflects on the phrase, however, the more interesting it becomes.

Like every contemporary university, King’s exists within a dense bureaucratic apparatus of reporting systems and carefully maintained statistical categories.

In other words, there is no shortage of administrative intricacy. The institution is able to appraise almost every aspect of its own existence. Yet when the questions turn to academic freedom, the trail abruptly vanishes into the undergrowth.

The incantation Information not held explains, for example, that data concerning student disciplinary processes could not be supplied because retrieving them would exceed the statutory cost limit. In other words, the records exist but are scattered across hundreds of files and cannot readily be assembled.

There remains something dimly comic about an institution capable of monitoring training participation, governance compliance, reporting pathways and stakeholder engagement finding itself defeated by the question of how often it disciplines people over speech-related matters.

The Accountability Disposal Unit

The problem is not secrecy in the traditional sense. Quite the reverse. Modern institutions generate information at a prodigious rate. Every activity leaves a paper trail. Every paper trail acquires an oversight mechanism. Before long, entire administrative ecosystems emerge around the task of documenting other administrative ecosystems; thereby, ensuring full employment for amies of administrators in perpetuity.

The paradox is that all this information exists in a state of permanent administrative dispersion. It sits in different systems, databases, categories and procedural compartments. Individual records exist, in theory, but the larger picture remains elusive.

This strikes me as a peculiarly modern form of evasiveness. The old bureaucratic vice was concealment. The contemporary version is fragmentation. Information is not hidden necessarily but broken into so many bits that meaningful scrutiny begins to resemble an archaeological expedition.

The arrangement possesses the advantage that now no-one needs to suppress the evidence. The evidence remains available much as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle remain available after someone has emptied the box into a neighbouring county. By the time one has gathered enough fragments to discern the pattern, most reasonable people will have lost the will to live.

The black rectangle has not disappeared as such. It has simply been decentralised into bureaucratic oblivion.

Everything logged, nothing is noticed

The most revealing thing in all this is the gap between what modern universities record and what they seem interested in finding out.

King’s can tell you who attended a workshop, completed a training module or clicked their way through the latest mandatory online course on the Correct Management of Unconscious Micro-Sighs During Meetings, or whatever life-draining competency requirement it is these days.

Yet ask how academic freedom has actually fared inside the institution over time and the administrative omniscience disappears. An organisation capable of measuring, recording and categorising almost everything has generated remarkably little documentary evidence on the subject.

The black rectangles that featured so prominently in my Subject Access Requests at least possessed a certain honesty. Crude, stupid and impossible to miss, they served as a running commentary on the institution’s underlying lack of commitment to openness.

The Freedom of Information response, by contrast, reveals the administrative equivalent of hiding a tree in a forest. The information exists but has simply been buried beneath so much process, categorisation and record-keeping that nobody is expected to notice what it says.

Freedom beyond approved limits

There is one final detail in the Freedom of Information response that deserves mention.

Among the reporting categories used within King’s so-called “Report and Support” system is the following:

I have witnessed expression which exceeds Freedom of Expression principles.

According to the university’s own figures, seven reports concerning academic staff were recorded under this heading.

I confess I spent several minutes staring at this formulation. The category is illuminating precisely because it is so strange.

Speech can be unlawful, defamatory or threatening. These are recognisable concepts. But expression which exceeds Freedom of Expression principles?

What exactly does this mean? How is ‘excessive’ defined? Is there a recommended daily allowance of liberty? A safe operating limit beyond which freedom becomes hazardous? Does the university maintain a specialist unit responsible for responding to incidents of ‘excessive’ freedom?

If King’s wished to record instances of unlawful speech, it could simply say so. If it wished to record harassment, discrimination or defamation, it could say that too. People can argue about what conduct falls within these categories, but these terms possess established legal and procedural meanings that delineate boundaries. “Expression which exceeds Freedom of Expression principles” does none of these things.

It is, in fact, a term by which managerial authoritarianism disguises itself in vague language. The category identifies no rule, specifies no standard and establishes no obvious limit. Almost any speech somebody dislikes can potentially be made to fit inside it. Nobody can say with confidence where the boundary resides because no boundary has been drawn. Consequently, the category functions not as a standard but as a permission slip for subjective interpretation.

I can see how this category of understanding might have functioned in my case during the Endangered Speeches controversy. No-one alleged that procedures had been breached, because they had not. The problem was simply the perception that I had crossed an invisible line by establishing the speaker series in the first place. Nobody could say where the line was. Nobody could identify the rule from which it derived. Yet it possessed the amazing property of materialising whenever some bad faith ideologue wished to accuse someone of crossing it.

Once again, though, the category succeeds in unmasking the College’s true attitude towards academic freedom. The term “I have witnessed expression which exceeds Freedom of Expression principles” is no accidental invention. Institutions genuinely committed to freedom of expression would never create reporting categories for speech that is supposedly ‘too free’.

Conclusions and recommendations

After two Subject Access Requests, one Freedom of Information request and several years spent examining the College’s explanations of itself, I have arrived at the conclusion that KCL talks about academic freedom when circumstances force it to. Evidence of a corresponding institutional commitment is considerably harder to find.

The university can produce frameworks, procedures, governance structures, compliance systems and training modules at industrial scale. It can count attendees, measure participation and generate enough paperwork to deforest a medium-sized Scandinavian country.

What it struggles to produce is convincing evidence that it regards freedom of thought as anything other than a problem requiring management.

That, ultimately, is what the Freedom of Information response reveals. Not through some dramatic disclosure, but through a free speech training programme costing 46 pence per head and a reporting mechanism for speech that is apparently considered excessively free.

Professor Kapur assured us that universities have devoted “significant resources” to championing free speech. The figures tell their own story.

In my earlier essays, I suggested that my two Pomeranians, Kiki and Samurai, possessed a better understanding of freedom of expression than King’s College London.

At the time, this was intended as satire. The Freedom of Information response has forced me to reconsider.

The comparison was unfair.

I therefore owe an apology.

To the dogs.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra. He was formerly the head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he acquired a lasting interest in bureaucratic absurdity and the importance of retaining documentary evidence. He remains grateful to the College for unintentionally providing so much source material.