Students should feel safe on campus. So what’s the plan?

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that there will be “zero tolerance for inaction” by universities over antisemitism.

Opening a summit on the issue at Downing St held in the wake of the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green and a series of attacks at synagogues and other Jewish sites in recent months, Starmer argued that hate begins with ideas, misinformation, tropes and conspiracy theories, and “with attitudes that, left unchecked, can take root and spread”.

So having reminded the audience of the existing £7 million investment to tackle antisemitism and fund Holocaust education, he announced that “today, we are going further”:

We already expect universities to set out clear disciplinary consequences for antisemitism, and to enforce them. And so we will hold them to account on that.

That, I think it’s safe to say, is (at least in England) the Office for Students’ (OfS) Condition E6 – which was almost exclusively framed around sexual harassment and midconduct until it needed to be retrofitted to encompass antisemitism as reports on its scale continued to land.

There may, perhaps, be a line in a strategic priorities letter stressing that the above must happen – but as I noted at the weekend, the existing design (a muscular and incident-response regulator for free speech plonked inside a broader market regulator) is not at all suited to this end of the see-saw.

But it was the next line that caught my eye:

Today, I can announce that we will lift the bar higher – when abuses take place, we are calling on universities to demonstrate action. We will now expect them to publish the scale of the problem on their campuses, as well as the specific steps they have taken to clamp down on it. There will be zero tolerance for inaction.

That very much sounds like a new sort of regulatory requirement. At the Downing Street lobby briefing later, the Guardian reports that the PM’s spokesperson was unable to say what would happen to universities that failed to comply with the new requirement to show what they were doing to tackle antisemitism. Asked about this, it reports that the spokesperson said:

In terms of next steps we’ll set them out in due course. We already expect universities to set out clear disciplinary consequences for antisemitism and to enforce them, and so we will hold them to account on that.

It may well be that a detailed plan for a new regulatory requirement is waiting in the wings, perhaps with input from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and OfS. It could also be yet another line for a speech designed to sound tough with little of the required thinking underneath it.

But honestly? It’s not actually a daft idea.

Social and policy objectives

Paragraphs 14 and 15 of the OfS regulatory framework explain its operating philosophy as a regulator. It says that its approach to regulation will put “informed student choice and institutional autonomy” at its heart, that “the dynamic of providers responding to informed student choice is the best mechanism for driving quality and improvement, and that it will “regulate to ensure a baseline of protection for all students and the taxpayer.”

Plenty of people have written plenty of words (including me) from plenty of angles on this site and elsewhere about how fundamentally flawed that all is. But arguably less attention has been paid to the other plank of its operating philosophy:

…[we will also seek] to deliver social and policy objectives in areas where market mechanisms may not succeed. For example, the improvements in access and participation that students and society require will not be delivered by the market alone. This means that the OfS will take direct regulatory action to drive improvement in this area, beyond that necessary to preserve a minimum baseline.

To the extent to which you’ve been set up as a market regulator and to the extent to which that makes sense, the carve-out for things the market might not prioritise all on its own also makes some sense.

It’s been operationalised through various iterations of access (and participation) plans, with a focus on the use of student lifecycle outcomes to identify (or at least help providers to identify) gaps that providers have to work to close.

The thing that’s always been odd about it, though, is the lack of focus on experience. Put simply, you can be having a rotten time – or at least a student group that shares a particular characteristic can be having a rotten time – and as long as undergraduates that share that characteristic hang on to their second year, complete the course and get a decent job, you’ll never show up for action.

I’ve written various critiques of that approach before, principally from the perspective of disabled students. And to be fair to OfS, it’s been slowly learning the limits of (Michael) Barberism, noting that some students don’t get what they were promised, some don’t feel free to speak, and disabled students have legal rights that are often not met regardless of their outcomes.

But that has all tended to be piecemeal, reactive and chaotic – which when fused with requirements like “consultation” or “conditions of registration” goes on to feel overwhelming and ineffective.

So why not, to borrow a phrase from the lexicon, be risk-based?

Focus groups

Antisemitism is a scourge. If a culture of casual antisemitism is allowed to fester, it’s a decent bet that that culture will then play a role in fostering some behaviours that turn into violence later.

But we should be honest. Today the focus is on antisemitism because two Jewish men have been stabbed in Golders Green. Next week there may be as report on the discrimination that autistic students face, or the unreported rape and sexual assaults that face (primarily) women on campus. There may be a serious incident involving a black student, or a trans student, or a report on Muslim students’ experiences of HE.

None of the reports or the incidents that surround them are likely to concern things under the exclusive control of their universities – but universities will have a role to play in addressing or preventing them. That’s a given. The question is whether it’s wise to address the issues in the round strategically to avoid the endless cycle of roundtables, taskforces, speeches and the like that all seem to resemble that “something must be done, this is something, therefore universities must do this” cycle that universities seem to be trapped in.

We should be honest about the interaction of any of these issues with freedom of speech. This weekend’s “should the phrase ‘Globalise the intifada’ be allowed” talk show talking point is almost identical to 2023’s “should the phrase ‘From the river to the sea’ be allowed”, generating endless see-saw sitting and claims to context (“time, place and manner”, and now “intensity and frequency”) that satisfy no-one. You can’t write this stuff down. You do have to never stop talking about it.

We should have a grown-up conversation about “safety”. That the questionably-funded Spiked! mob have managed to infect political discourse to the extent to which many regard “feeling psychologically safe” as a childish version of the woke mind virus is profoundly disturbing. Feeling psychologically safe is the precursor to the discussion of difficult ideas, not a preventer of it.

We should also be honest about the scale of risks. It is of course the case that antisemitism can fester in environments that do not have a single Jewish person in them. But it is also the case that the announcement from Keir Starmer is more likely to be important at the University of Leeds and the University of Birmingham than it is at a raft of post-92s – not because antisemitism doesn’t matter where Jewish students aren’t, but because it really does matter much more where Jewish students are.

I should also be clear that we should seek to avoid focussing or prioritising action on discrimination and harassment based on protected characteristic population proportions – some types of conduct are more prevalent in some populations than others, and the whole point is that much of this is about, by definition, minorities. But that is precisely why action should be more risk-based, not less. In other words, it’s not just that the qual can explain the quant. It’s that often, the qual is the issue in and of itself.

Enter the eorr

Back in 2022, when OfS first published a draft of its “Equality of Opportunity Risk Register”, so taken was I with the concept that I started road testing it for other purposes than closing B3 gaps. It seemed to me that a system that said “here’s where people’s perceptions are, here’s what the data shows, here’s where the biggest risks are and so here’s our plan to start to close them” was a decent way of approaching all sorts of issues related to the student experience.

Plenty of SU groups have gone on to play a training game of this sorts – fusing qual and quant intel on everything from belonging to “the university experience” to having a “crap time at uni”, and the results have been fascinating.

It also struck me that within any university, different departments, settings, activities and student groups would have meaningfully different risk profiles. The student staff ratio matters. The competence of the staff already in place matters. Whether the activity in question takes place in a controlled seminar room or at 11pm in the bar of a residential field trip matters. Whether the students in scope feel able to put their hand up matters even more. In other words, you can look at student groups and identify issue risks, or look at issue risks and identify student groups.

Apply all of that to antisemitism specifically and the question stops being “does our university have a problem” – which most universities don’t have a clean answer to anyway – and starts being “where, in this university, are safety, harassment and discrimination perceptions poor, where are risks concentrated, what are we doing about it, and how would we know if it was working”.

It might be the politics, IR and area studies departments where seminars on Israel and Palestine are taught. It might be the way SU elections play out when an issue blows up internationally. It might mean looking at particular societies, particular online spaces, particular events in the calendar, the particular profile of this year’s recruited students, or the gap between what gets reported and what actually happens in the corridor or the WhatsApp group. It might even mean asking a safety question in the NSS as well as asking a freedom question – not least because our qual suggests that students think about the former while Arif Ahmed interprets the results as signals of the latter.

If we want to make the publication bit of Starmer’s announcement work, that is what “publish the scale of the problem on their campuses” actually has to mean. Prevalence data with enough granularity to identify pockets of risk (OfS promised that for (sexual) harassment and misconduct and then dropped the idea). Theories of change attached to those pockets. Consequences when prevalence stays flat or rises. And – the bit that’s always hardest – it has to be riskier for a provider to bury that data than to publish it, otherwise the only thing it’ll measure is willingness to be honest.

Both ends of the see-saw

The other reason a risk-based approach to experience matters is the one that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator has been making for years. Students are entitled to both the learning outcomes they were promised and the learning opportunities their funding was supposed to pay for. OfS’ EDI work has been almost exclusively focused on the first end of that see-saw, with the other end playing only an explanatory role for outcomes.

Designing a regulatory regime that could see all of those things at once would look quite a lot like the one Starmer has – probably accidentally – just gestured at.

The architecture is interesting. OfS already has the powers under HERA to require providers to gather and publish data on equality of opportunity. And I’m reminded of this John Blake-era slide pointing out that the regulator neither has to, nor can, palm matters of EDI off on the EHRC.

As I’ve said before on here, when it comes to issues like the one in this blog – highlighting that most universities don’t analyse the make up of those involved in (academic or wider) disciplinary cases – there should be an answer. And when it comes to the example in this paper of a university gathering sexual violence prevalence data and then shelving its publication or discussion for reputation reasons needs a regulatory response, I have a simple view of the regulatory objective – it needs to be riskier for a university to bury results like that than to publish them.

Requiring a university to take a cross-cutting, in-the-round strategic assessment of its own climate of culture for those with protected characteristics ought not to be onerous. Requiring a plan to improve is apparatus that’s there now. Supporting it with data of the sort we already see for APPs should be a walk in the park. Creating complaint and incident categories and requiring some uniform reporting on them can’t be beyond the sector. If nothing else, that the APP dashboards show me outcomes by characteristic, but not experience by those same characteristics, is just wild.

A system of that sort – bringing the intent of E6 into the kind of things OfS expects overall in access and participation planning – would be capable of qualitative input, could encompass and incorporate priorities set by government from time to time, generate cross-sector learning and demonstrate a continual understanding of the scale and shape of problems on campus.

Asking a university not for its policies but for its plan to ensure that students feel and are safe – with all the national data underpinnings and student engagement sign off required to prevent reputational self-denial – would show up new problems, offer confidence to those impacted, and signal with some clarity that work of this sort is not a “deliverable” via a webpage, a crisis summit, a round table, or a suite of priorities.

Tackling discrimination, harassment and hate is, sadly, a long-term journey. Universities need to take students on the journey, and prove they’re slowly getting there.