The threat to free speech in universities

bout these issues,” says Dunning. “[Hefosa] would have been a massive change.” OfS draft guidelines made clear that Confucius Institutes would have had to obey UK non-discrimination laws on hiring. When academics are denied Chinese visas on political grounds, their institutions would have been expected to issue a public condemnation. Universities would have had to do more to ensure that foreign funding did not distort their scholarship and to protect their students from ideological surveillance.

Since going public with her story, Shipworth said she has heard from academics around the country who have been told to drop criticisms of China and turn a blind eye to evidence of cheating. Her head of department and colleagues seemed to understand neither their duties nor their obligations concerning academic freedom, she said. “They thought they were completely within their rights to do what they did to me. I know from discussion groups I’m in that censorship and self-censorship are routine across all universities now.”

If the last-gasp attempts to save Hefosa fail, who should be held responsible for its demise? If this was a game of Cluedo, the denouement would be that vice-ch­ancellors did the deed in the corridors of Westminster by wielding threats of their sector’s collapse. For many of those running the country’s universities, free speech is not merely an unnecessary frippery — it is a burden they would rather be rid of.