The College Stasi Files

This post, authored by Michael Rainsborough, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

Readers of the Daily Sceptic may recall my earlier tale of intellectual misadventure in a leafy corner of a Russell Group university. Well, by leafy corner, I mean the grotesque urban barnacle that is King’s College London, wedged as it is between the Strand and the Thames, where the prevailing foliage consists mostly of disillusionment, hand sanitiser and the wilted remnants of faculty once known to have differing points of view.

It was here, back in 2018-19, that I had the avant-garde notion that universities should be universities — spaces where, you know, ideas are tested and knowledge expanded through civil debate.

My first essay recounted how I organised a speaker series entitled ‘Endangered Speeches: Debating the Culture Wars‘. The event, hosted by the War Studies department — a place once devoted to analysing the clash of arms but now seemingly alarmed by the clash of subjective harms — triggered fainting spells from an activist clique, a comically illiterate petition (re-published here for the deserved embarrassment of the signatories), administrative panic, managerial meetings conducted in tones usually reserved for hostage negotiations, and eventually, my quiet defenestration as head of department.

Late last year, encouraged by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), I applied for a Subject Access Request — or my College Stasi file as I came to call it — a 60-page PDF drenched in black rectangles. A sort of modernist elegy to institutional cowardice, it read like the lovechild of Franz Kafka and Microsoft Outlook: mass redactions, secret denunciations, whispered innuendo, accusations of being a Right-wing provocateur who was “clearly against liberal democracy” (a charge I wear with pride).

It was a flawless expression of the decline of the modern British university: evasive, passive-aggressive, utterly certain of its own moral superiority and thus of course deeply allergic to anything that smacked of free thinking.

The whole situation veered into the surreal. I couldn’t help but note that my two Pomeranians — full-throated in their anti-doorbell belligerence — demonstrated a more instinctive commitment to freedom of expression than my former employers.

It all resembled a low-budget Carry On film. Carry On Up the Admin Block, if you will.

And like many film franchises of variable quality, this farce has a sequel — because, having read what survived the editorial guillotine, I challenged the handling of my case. I pointed out that the file’s relationship to the truth was roughly on a par with a Netflix docuseries. Why the vast oceans of black ink? Why the selective quotations, amputated of all context?

In response, KCL offered — most generously — to conduct a further search of relevant materials, provided I could supply specific themes: dates, astrological alignments, inside leg measurements, possibly a mood board. They would then, with due reluctance, rummage once more through their internal surveillance files.

And so, here we are again. Another descent into the bureaucratic void. Darker and even more absurd. Welcome to The Stasi Files II: Return of the Dead-Eye.

Stay tuned, the lanyards are circling.

File and Prejudice

In the fullness of time, I received a second instalment from the College Stasi archives — accompanied by a slightly patronising letter from a college functionary implying that this grudgingly assembled ragbag was to be viewed as a privilege, and that I was probably a bit dim for expecting anything so vulgar as context or clarity. Had I not grasped the intricacies of data protection by which transparency is achieved through deletion?

Incredibly, this latest piecemeal collection appeared even more haphazard, more furiously redacted, and more structurally unintelligible than the last — a feat I had not previously thought humanly possible. It was a perverse achievement of sorts: the improbable fusion of bureaucratic incompetence and strategic vagueness.

The first section was largely taken up with a truncated reproduction of an investigative report by CAF, entitled ‘King’s College of Cancellations‘ — a study into the dismal state of academic freedom at the College.

There were, however, several mysteries. First, why include a document that anyone with Wi-Fi and a functioning index finger could already read online? Second, why reproduce only half of it, terminating abruptly mid-sentence like a Cold War telegram? And third — and most bizarrely — why redact sections of a document already in the public domain?

It wasn’t a file in any meaningful sense. It was a procedural charade — riddled with holes, yet, like the first batch of documents, oddly revealing despite itself.

Fifty Shades of Black Ink

What this theatre of ineptitude achieved — entirely by accident — was a quietly dazzling act of inadvertent self-exposure.

For in redacting a publicly available document, the college offered a glimpse into the lizard-brain theology behind the black marker — steeped in pettiness, paranoia and a striking lack of literacy. Entire sentences were arbitrarily censored; individual words, even subordinating conjunctions like ‘that’ or ‘while’, were zealously blacked out. The result was not only incoherent, but unintentionally hilarious.

Yet the absurdity shaded quickly into menace. The redactions were most heavily applied to passages that cast the college in an unfavourable light — such as the following, in which the CAF report noted:

None of the people we spoke to — all academics of considerable renown — wished to go on record. Most of them would not even communicate with CAF through their university-provided email accounts. They agreed to comment on the culture at King’s only on condition of strict anonymity.

This approach — selectively redacting content that might prove inconvenient — was consistent throughout.

Even more surreal was the blacking out of entire messages, along with the names of senders. What was the point of including this material at all? Nothing made narrative sense. Seemingly, the same Data Protection Act that grants the right to access one’s personal data is invoked to redact the very information required to interpret it — a kind of institutional gaslighting.

One might even say that the redactions themselves are the message — a bureaucratic gesture in which the redaction is the real communication. We have entered a post-linguistic phase of data protection in which the only right you retain is the right to gaze at blank rectangles.

Thought Police Academy

But as ever, what little slips through the blackout is more than enough. As I pointed out in the first essay, the file isn’t really about you — it’s about them. It offers an unguarded look inside the cathedral: a hermetically sealed ecosystem not unlike the old GDR politburo, complete with jargon, self-justification and a pathological inability to recognise its own hypocrisy.

If anything signals the ethical collapse of the modern university, it is this: that the expression of intellectually mainstream, publicly defensible views is now reclassified as suspect — and those who voice them are subject to internal discipline and reputational incineration.

The first revelation concerned the circumstances that led to my unpersoning as head of department. One comment, delivered with unfiltered managerial malice — and, one assumes, with the comforting expectation that I would never read it — stated that my “‘unique perspectives’ [tellingly highlighted in scare quotes] needed to be brought to heel”.

Here it is. Clear as day. The ‘unique perspectives’ in question being the subversive belief that a university should support the pluralistic exchange of ideas. Apparently, that now counted as ideological deviance. Grounds for corrective action.

Another obedient scribe alleged I had “lost the team” — and therefore, presumably, had to be neutralised. It was typical of the kind of smug, unfalsifiable assertion that people repeat to themselves in order to reframe unprincipled decisions as collective wisdom, and to sublimate whatever flickers of conscience they might fleetingly experience.

Granted, among a departmental staff of 120, I may have “lost” (or rather never acquired) the support of a few hard-line campus commissars. But as the CAF interviews revealed, there were in fact many more — quite possibly a majority — who quietly shared my “unique perspectives”.

The trouble was, those making the most noise had the sympathetic ear of the executive dean, who broadly shared their worldview. So too, one suspects, did the senior college leadership. Add to that a line manager whose main professional contribution was forwarding emails — at £90,000 a year — and who offered all the moral resistance of a soggy napkin, and the outcome was inevitable.

Another email from one of these self-appointed thought-monitors confidently predicted that my departure would “make a big difference to the department’s future cohesion”. Well, if by cohesion one means the exclusion of wrongthinkers and the enforcement of ideological hygiene, then it certainly did the trick. The message was clear: deviate, and you’ll be removed, denounced and memory holed.

Don’t Look Mike

Elsewhere, the file reveals that College bureaucrats remain obsessed with what I’ve written about my experience — and are irked that I refuse to shut up. No doubt they’re poring over this article right now, possibly huddled in a breakout space, clutching lanyards like rosary beads. Every time I speak, write or am rumoured to have typed something somewhere, they appear to convene miniature tribunals to ‘talk through the background ’ —always without my input, naturally — where only one version of events is on offer (and it isn’t mine).

At no point, of course, is there any indication that they’ve attempted to address the actual issues raised — whether by me, CAF, or others — regarding the prevailing atmosphere of intolerance, informal sanctioning and free-speech-phobia. Instead, the documents confirm what can only be described as institutional narcissism: a doctrinal feedback loop endlessly recycled by those too proud to be questioned and too incurious to notice. It’s a circular, self-affirming dogma maintained by a caste of pseudo-academics, convinced of their own righteousness, immune to irony and untroubled by the burden of introspection. Their special cocktail of vanity and dysfunction makes it pointless to expect honesty — or even basic self-awareness.

Except, occasionally, the mask slips — and when it does, it’s never subtle. In one exchange, a junior Robespierre maxed out their weekly ration of amateur psychology by declaring — presumably in an attempt at insight — that “the issue with Mike wasn’t freedom of expression… [‘he’ — again, inexplicably — redacted] rather enjoyed the wackiness”.

There it is: a textbook example of the diagnostician’s fantasy — where dissent is pathologised, disagreement psychoanalysed and principled objection rebranded as performance. I wasn’t driven by academic values; I was acting out. Apparently, I staged my own exclusion for the thrill of it — a performative exile for personal amusement.

Sure, I can laugh at it all in hindsight. The whole thing replays like a slapstick farce. But at the time being smeared, excluded and hung out to dry wasn’t quite my idea of fun. I enjoy mocking it now — but back then? Not so much. It was an idiotic comment — but like most institutional idiocy, unintentionally revealing.

You’ve Got Male (and He’s Non-Compliant)

I mentioned in my first essay that Dr Edward Skidelsky, Director of CAF, publicly described my case as one of the worst they had encountered. My rhetorical question to the apparatchiks at King’s is therefore this: do they have the faintest idea why he said that?

For a long time, I wasn’t sure myself. I even doubted whether my case merited that kind of distinction, until a former colleague, who shared my “unique perspectives”, wrote to say he’d finally understood it. The answer, he suggested, was painfully simple: no wrongdoing was required — just perceived ideological deviation.

No edgy tweets. No off-colour jokes. No overheard remarks. No breaches of protocol. No disciplinary record. Not even a stray comma in an email. I wasn’t on a crusade to be the model employee, but as head of department I had the good sense to do things by the book: the speaker series followed all college procedures, and at all times I operated well within departmental norms — and firmly within my rights under the Education Act (1986).

And yet — they still came for me.

And that’s the point. There was not even any pretext. That’s what makes it serious. That’s why it doesn’t go away. The lesson is that even those who play by the rules are at risk. You don’t need to err. You just need to think the wrong thing.

And when compliance with policy is no defence against deviation from orthodoxy, you’re no longer in a university — you’re in a cult with PR branding.

May be there’s some grim satisfaction to be gained from the fact I’ve been living rent-free in a few heads at King’s for over seven years. I suppose that’s what happens when you play FAFO with someone who refuses to be neatly disappeared.

And now, slowly but surely, their behaviour is being dragged into the light: by the Office for Students, by the passage of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, and by official inquiries like the Independent Review led by Professor Alice Sullivan, which lays bare the kind of reputational wrecking-ball reserved for anyone who fails to kneel at the correct ideological altar.

I’m not holding my breath, but perhaps something good may yet come of this: that universities might begin to observe neutrality again. That they might remember their purpose is not moral instruction, nor political conformity, but the advancement of knowledge. That they might stop purging dissenters in the name of progress.

Kindergarten College

What I’m mostly left with, to be honest, is less regret than a kind of forensic recognition — a cold awareness of just how much has been lost, and a deep disdain for those who helped burn it all down. Right across the wider academic landscape: the petty authoritarians, the hollow managers, the anti-intellectual functionaries posing as scholars. People who have destroyed the university from within, all while mouthing pieties about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’. People with no interest in pluralism, dialogue or knowledge — just compliance and ideological house-training.

That recognition echoes something Andrew Doyle said recently in a Comedy Unleashed set. Doyle, who knows academia well, reflected on his decade spent writing books defending basic notions such as “free speech is probably quite a good thing”, or “men and women are different”, or “maybe we should judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”. As he sagely observed: “Why the f*** am I writing books about this shit? It’s like writing a book about how gravity is quite useful.”

He continued: “I’ve wasted 10 years of my life. That’s what the woke movement has done. We could have gone somewhere — and instead we chose retardation.”

I know what he means. I think many decent academics do. As I once wrote of my experience organising the ‘Endangered Speeches’ series, trying to explain the importance of free expression to senior colleagues — many of whom should have known better, and others whom I came to realise were constitutionally incapable of knowing better — was like explaining to a toddler that airports are where planes land and zoos are where animals live.

It was farcical. Infantile. A parody of adulthood. And like Doyle, I resent the sheer amount of time and energy that has been spent — wasted — having to re-teach credentialed adolescents the academic equivalent of gravity.

Meanwhile, we must continue to endure the meanderings from college figures, not least the current Vice Chancellor, who issues statements about how much “good faith” they have put into championing academic freedom — declarations so vacuous, so tonally estranged from reality, that they make timeshare pitches in Marbella sound like models of integrity.

The effect is, again, less reassuring than darkly comic: the kind of theatrical sanctimony that makes you wonder if even they believe what they’re saying, or if the words are simply generated by some chatbot programmed to auto-burp clichés.

Gone With the Guidelines

In the end, as I said in the first essay, my case is just a small exhibit in a much larger museum of institutional decline — a minor demonstration of what happens when integrity, pluralism and intellectual seriousness are gradually corroded from within.

If you’re looking for a single line that captures it all, it is Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics: “The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Rarely has a law read so accurately as the unofficial mission statement of modern academia.

A university worthy of the name exists to pursue truth — to expand the frontiers of knowledge through open inquiry, civil disagreement and a commitment to testing all ideas. That this is now sufficient grounds for internal sanction — that merely upholding these values can earn one the label of dissenter, someone with “unique perspectives” who must be “brought to heel” — shows how little the modern university now tolerates the thing it claims to exist for.

Yes, I can look back and see the absurdity, the tragicomedy, the “wackiness” of it all. And yes, we can — and should — mock the liturgy of institutional virtue-signalling that now passes for leadership.

But the sad, unfunny truth is this: they’re no longer universities in any meaningful intellectual or moral sense. They are anti-universities. They are cognitive enclosures: accredited zones of pre-approved ideas and ideologically screened emotions. These curated mind spaces are committed not to inquiry, but to orthodoxy.

The College Stasi Files reveal all of this — not just by what they say, but by what they redact. Not by the charges made, but by the silence where evidence should be.

And for what it’s worth, I know two Pomeranians with a better grasp of academic freedom. And they bark at their own reflections.

Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic currently residing in Australia with two principled Pomeranians and an undecolonised sense of irony. A former Head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, he now features regularly in internal emails, is the recipient of two heavily anonymised PDF dossiers and a footnote in the risk register. Officially redacted, yet thoroughly unrepentant, he continues to be cited for his ‘unique perspectives’ — always in scare quotes. Last seen East of Suez with no plans to shut-up.

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