CAF has today submitted Freedom of Information requests to 130 UK universities, seeking to establish the extent to which aggressive legal threats from wealthy individuals, companies and other powerful interests may be inhibiting academic research. Why now? Earlier this month, MPs debated the need for universal anti-SLAPP legislation. The House formally recognised the threat that Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) pose to “public interest research”, while Courts Minister Sarah Sackman identified cases involving “academic research” among those falling outside the UK’s existing statutory protections. That’s good news. While SLAPPs are most commonly associated with attempts to intimidate journalists and campaigners, there are well-documented cases in which academics and publishers have faced similar legal pressure over their work. Two Private Members’ Bills now seek to extend anti-SLAPP protection beyond its existing narrow focus on economic crime. The Government is working with both sponsors, and the Telegraph has reported that it is expected to back Sir John Whittingdale’s Bill, due for second reading on 27 November. As a member of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, CAF wants to establish what legal pressure on academic research actually looks like across UK higher education, and ensure that the Government’s welcome recognition of the problem is carried through into the legislation that emerges. Institutional records can reveal only part of the picture, however — which is why we also want to hear from you. Some legal threats may be handled privately by academics, sometimes with the assistance of a trade union or publisher, without ever reaching a university’s central legal office. In other cases, the threat of ruinously expensive litigation may cause research to be narrowed, abandoned or left unpublished long before proceedings are issued. So if you have faced legal threats over your academic work — or if concern about possible litigation has affected what you researched, wrote or published — please contact us confidentially at [email protected].

Nearly 4,000 academic posts in the social sciences, humanities and arts were lost in the year to December 2024. This is deeply troubling new analysis from the British Academy — and the picture has only deteriorated since, with further large-scale cuts, many of them again affecting humanities, arts and social-science provision, proposed at Exeter, Nottingham, Lincoln and Hertfordshire and elsewhere. There is no doubt that universities are in serious financial difficulty, placing them under pressure to cut courses and staff. But, as CAF has argued, they do not respond to those pressures in an ideological or political vacuum. Government policy increasingly directs funding, recognition and institutional prestige towards designated strategic sectors — particularly STEM, technology and healthcare provision, alongside fields aligned with the industrial strategy. In doing so, it implicitly distinguishes between economically legible forms of teaching and research — those capable of producing commercial innovation, spin-out companies and a workforce aligned with government priorities — and forms less readily valued on those terms. The result? University leaders are given powerful reasons to treat strategically aligned disciplines as investments, while regarding the humanities, arts and much of the social sciences as liabilities. And, of course, these are often precisely the forms of inquiry academic freedom is most needed to protect: curiosity-driven rather than applied research; artistic and creative work that refuses to let what J. S. Mill called “dead dogma” harden into common sense; and teaching that treats the systems, norms and theories government would prefer to regard as inert resources as objects of critique. Financial pressure creates the imperative to cut. Government policy increasingly shapes what universities choose to protect — and what they allow to disappear. We explored that wider framework here: afcomm.org.uk/2026/07/15/exe… @Freedom_in_Arts @RosieKayK2CO @AFFSUK