‘We Need To Burn The Whole Thing Down And Start Again’
Sean Parker’s personal take on the AFAF Annual Conference 2025
The title was uttered as both statement and question by Professors Jo Phoenix and Michael Ben-Gad at the Academics For Academic Freedom annual conference in Conway Hall on 22 November 2025. This was part of the ‘Why Sex Matters’ panel in Phoenix’s case, and the Antisemitism panel in Ben Gad’s, in response to other members feeling ‘depressed’ as to what to do about academic freedom in UK universities.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling that sex means sex, and the Trump-brokered ceasefire in Gaza, still keffiyeh-clad students (and their lecturers) across the land harass counter-narrative academics: those there to actually expand the students’ minds beyond reductive positions.
‘Feminist theory from the 1980s has been all but eradicated’ from many syllabi, said Phoenix, while her co-panellist Maya Forstater said that while toilets and pronouns had once been seen as the soft end of the debate, they were in fact central to it.
Forstater, along with Ben Gad, proved to be hilarious speakers, their wit and dark humour at the madness poking through time and again, making the AFAF crowd belly laugh multiple times: ‘The point of going to the loo isn’t to be affirmed in your gender’ (Forstater). While not explicitly academically related, it seems not even the Supreme Court can stop biological males swimming in the women’s part of Hampstead swimming baths.
Single gender toilets were also an issue at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), of which there were many representatives.
Members’ Voices
One speaker from ‘professional services’ at a Birmingham University pointed out that professional services were a ‘massive problem’ regarding academic freedom. AFAF should consider forming a Professional Services Branch.
AFAF branch co-convenor Jim Butcher said that Human Resources at CCCCU had gone the way of all things in being relabelled ‘People and Culture’, while pointing out that some powers were trying to incorporate academic freedom into the spectrum of protected characteristics – presumably to better control its expression. Jim said academic freedom ‘mustn’t become just another “identity” amongst others’.
Higher Education Freedom Of Speech Act (HEFOSA) hound Abishek Saha from Queen Mary University of London AFAF reported on Bridget Phillipson’s moves over the last couple of years (in basically proposing to repeal most of its points), and said that we needed a proper complaint scheme, not judicial reviews. Ken Maver from St. Andrews University AFAF said that ‘Belonging’ (his discipline) now meant simply belonging to an identitarian group; while Lawrence Patihis from Portsmouth AFAF said, as a cognitive psychologist, ‘there must be a way of thinking about this situation that doesn’t depress you’.
As a balm for this understandable sentiment there were positive signs from Reading University, who handled academic freedom well, and of course always the self-declared ‘non-woke’ University of Buckingham. Your author also located no less than three representatives from le Grande Fromage Oxford University – which doesn’t have an AFAF branch (yet).
There was a ribald anecdote by a for-now-unnamed member over her ‘placement’ of the St George’s Cross and other ‘controversial’ cultural ephemera, which her head of DEI had to walk past every day, and for which she was threatened with disciplinary action. A representative from the Free Speech Union expressed the FSU’s support for all AFAF does; and Claire Reddleman of Manchester AFAF announced her imminent Notes On Teaching Freedom project.
AFAF founder Professor Dennis Hayes, who received an ovation, said that he often wrote to university vice-chancellors about issues and had considered responses. Not always. After he wrote to the University of Abertay Vice-Chancellor in defence of the academic freedom of Stuart Waiton (following Waiton’s own recent harassment for standing up for objectivity in rape trials in Scotland) he only received an anonymous, blunt response from the ‘Complaints Department’. However, in more encouraging news Dennis said Dublin AFAF were going to work more closely with the excellent Free Speech Ireland and other groups. Tim Crowley, who had a conference cancelled in May in was organising a ‘Cancel Club’ at University College Dublin. There were requests for members to form an AFAF Branch in Northern Ireland.
An often-repeated observation of the day was that the £500,000 fine levied at the University of Sussex following the Kathleen Stock saga – even though Sussex are appealing – appeared to have mysteriously focussed the minds of some other universities. As Spinal Tap once said so eloquently: ‘Money talks and bullshit walks’.
AFAF turns 20 in 2026. Here’s to another 20 years of AFAF – and the attendant absence of BS.
Sean Bw Parker MA is an artist, writer and contributor to Empowering The Innocent (University of Bristol) and New English Review. His 11th book Panopticon – Poems from the Justice System is published by Close To The Bone Publishing on 12th December.
