By Michael Rainsborough
The Rise of the Dark Lord
Had the Free Speech Union had been around back then, I would, no doubt, have stormed in with lawyers, righteous indignation and the soundtrack of Rambo (First Blood, not the later lesser movies). When I spoke with the Dean again the following week, I reiterated my disagreement with his facile accusations but given that the management's minds were made up I laid out my terms. I stepped down a year early and completed my conversion from happy-go-lucky Head into the College's very own Dark Lord. The files called me 'threatening and mercenary'. I was to be forever banished into the academic wilderness, exiled to the land of unread footnotes.
I can laugh about it now, but at the time, it was anything but funny. My respect for an institution I once proudly called my intellectual home evaporated faster than a puddle in the Sahara. Equally swift was the demise of my regard for certain colleagues, who turned out to be little more than budget-rate informants, alongside cowardly, career-climbing managers who seemed determined to set new records in mediocrity.
I felt alone and isolated. But not in a melodramatic, violin-solo kind of way. Rather in the cold, clinical sense of realising that former colleagues now treated me as if I were walking around in possession of half a pound of unstable weapons grade plutonium, the sort of person whose mere existence within a 50-foot radius could incinerate someone's career.
Former colleagues, the ones with whom I might once have shared a joke or even counted as friends, transformed overnight into nervous wrecks who could barely look me in the eye. Some ghosted me entirely, which, in fairness, probably spared me from the soul-sucking task of engaging with their gutless equivocations. The most bitter irony was that even those I had dragged back from the professional abyss—resurrecting their careers with my metaphorical defibrillator—were suddenly nowhere to be found. Apparently, all the good one has ever done vaporises in the heat of controversy, as if in some Orwellian fog of erasure.
Cancelled Before it Became Fashionable to be Cancelled
No good deed, as they say, goes unpunished. I was treated with the same disdain reserved for those who dared dissent in communist Czechoslovakia, as Václav Havel might have observed. It wasn't that people openly hated me—no, that would have been too honest. Instead, I became dangerous by association, a social outcast. The post-totalitarian tactics of social exclusion were wielded with chilling efficiency, enforcing conformity through a weapon more potent than outright hostility: stony silence.
Not that I cared what people thought of me. As long as I put in an honest day's work, I was fine being in a club of one—though I'll admit, it's a highly exclusive sort of membership. Still, the whole experience was exhausting, and the lingering sense of injustice stung like a sunburn you keep forgetting about until you wince against a seatback. I hazily recall evenings slumped on the sofa with one too many glasses of Tesco's finest bottom shelf Liebfraumilch (roughly £3.20 a bottle). A fine vintage. One chosen less for taste and more for its numbing qualities.
Despite everything, I wasn't shy in speaking or writing publicly about what happened. Between 2019 and 2020, several journalists took an interest in my story, particularly its broader implications for the emerging phenomenon of cancel culture. But as these things often go, nothing much came of it. Time marched on, as it always does, and I found myself relishing my time away from the College—especially during the COVID pandemic, which somehow managed to make the university experience even grimmer for both staff and students. I was glad to miss it.
'Voluntarily' Leaving Down the Fire Escape
In the end, the universe—perhaps feeling a pang of guilt—handed me a stroke of redemption: I was poached for a far better position by an institution where professional ethics weren't just an inside joke. A well-timed rescue. My King's College dementors probably took my escape as a personal affront. They may haunt the halls, but I'm the one who got to walk away.
As time passed, the sharp edges of the experience dulled, though the sense of being wronged never fully faded. No doubt my detractors would insist that I had 'voluntarily' stepped down from my role as Head and then 'voluntarily' left the College. Well, okay, I suppose so: There's a fire in the building, and you 'voluntarily' choose to leave down the fire escape.
If anything, over time, I found myself downplaying the whole ordeal. After all, I hadn't lost my job. Other victims of this modern variation of witch-hunting had endured worse. Even so, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I'd been cancelled before it became fashionable to be cancelled.
One of the most egregious comments in my file suggested my tenure had left the department in 'disarray'—a clumsy attempt to portray my time there as chaotic, which it most certainly wasn't. My tenure had, in fact, proceeded without a hitch for two and a half years—no complaints, no trouble—until a small brigade of activist zealots decided to kick up a storm, accusing me of unspeakable cognitive offences to anyone who'd lend an ear. Of course, they had the tacit support of my immediate manager, who, rather than lift a finger to defend me, opted for the ever-popular strategy of blending into the wallpaper and pretending not to notice.
One email in the file stands out: one plucky staff member—whose career, I suspect, hasn't flourished—wrote to the management, describing my removal as 'needlessly clandestine' and 'handled in a perplexing and unseemly manner'. What that email illustrated was that the true disarray in the department stemmed not from my leadership but from the grotesque way I was pushed out of the door. Ideologues in positions of seniority combined with feeble management had allowed a determined faction to play politics inside a once venerable department, fermenting a simmering dissatisfaction among staff, many of whom, though too fearful to speak out, continued to harbour deep misgivings.
Subject Access Request, or Suspicious Activity Report?
The legacy of this kind of turmoil doesn't dissipate—it festers. Years later, people from the university still contacted me, disturbed by the authoritarian direction in which things were heading at the College. They had heard about my story and wanted my thoughts, primarily for context. They were in touch with the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a courageous group dedicated to defending freedom of expression in universities. When I spoke with CAF, I reiterated that my experience, now some years in the past, was not as awful compared to others, such as Kathleen Stock who was hounded out of the University of Sussex. It wasn't until the Director of CAF, Dr Edward Skidelsky, expressed shock at my story, describing it as one of the worst cases they had encountered, that I sensed my treatment might have been more severe than I thought.
Members of CAF suggested I apply for a Subject Access Request (SAR) to see what the College had on me. The idea of opening my own quasi-Stasi file intrigued me. I vaguely remembered something about the right to request personal data under UK law, but I hadn't really looked into it. It's a bit like wondering what's hiding in your attic—you're not sure whether you want to knoThe German scholars Ralph Hertwig and Dagmar Ellerbrock noted that most people who could access their Stasi files didn't do so. Many feared the pain of discovering who had ratted them out while others simply thought, 'what's the point?' I sympathised with such sentiments. After all, there's something quite human about not wanting to know the unpleasant truth, or about feeling that perhaps some things are better left undisturbed.
Curiosity, as always, got the better of me. By then, I had a good sense of who had thrown me under the bus and the excuses they'd concocted to justify it. With the anger fading, I found myself oddly entertained by the whole spectacle. Exploring the SAR felt like watching a live demonstration of cognitive disintegration, where independent thought buckles under the crushing weight of collective idiocy. In that light, former colleagues were to be treated exactly as they should be—as lab specimens to be poked, prodded and, to use their favourite term, 'deconstructed', under the cold, dispassionate lens of hindsight.
So, with the encouragement of CAF and guided by the steady hand of the Free Speech Union, I sent off my SAR to King's College London. Following months of foot-dragging—way beyond the legal deadline—and after a polite nudge, the file finally arrived.
Fade to Black
What, then, did I learn from my college Stasi file? Well, the first thing I learned was that the Stasi analogy broke down completely.
Clicking on the password protected file was like opening a Christmas present, only to find another box gift-wrapped in black paper. It revealed the most striking difference between my 'Stasi' file and the real thing, namely that the Stasi were far more open and transparent. Say what you will about the East German authorities—they were at least thorough and competent record keepers. My file, by contrast, looked like it had been thrown together by a drunken intern on their lunch break. Pages were redacted into oblivion; email chains were jumbled like an ill-shuffled deck of cards. The whole thing teetered on the edge of parody. 'Protecting third-party privacy' was the pretext for the vast sea of redactions.
Comparing this to a 'Stasi file' was, in fact, an insult to the Stasi. At least former East German citizens could read their files and get a sense of the truth—horrid as it was. My so-called Subject Access Request was more like a pizza without any toppings. What separates the Stasi from the SAR, of course, is that the Stasi is defunct. Their state had crumbled, leaving no bureaucratic gatekeepers to decide what you can or can't see. My SAR, meanwhile, was the equivalent of knocking on the Stasi's door during their glory days and requesting to peruse one's file. At least, I suppose, a SAR request came minus the compulsory vacation at Hohenschönhausen prison.
In place of the all-inclusive stay at Hohenschönhausen, what I received was 60-odd pages of blackout poetry. A visual masterpiece of evasion. It shrieked, 'We're not even pretending to take this seriously'. There's simply no way this was the full sum of emails, notes and documents flying between staff about me. No, what I got was curated, sanitised, and—frankly—artfully stripped of context. You could practically hear them weighing every line: 'Does this cover our backsides? No? Black it out'. No wonder it took so long to get the darn thing back to me. It wasn't so much a document as a textbook in how to turn a paper trail into a smoke screen
Paradoxically, the power of this document lay in what it did not say. Forget 'redacted'—this thing was scorched earth. Even basic 'To' and 'From' lines in emails were hidden, though it didn't take much brainpower to work out who had cheerfully tossed me overboard. From the scant 'factual' scraps that survived, though, a few nuggets could still be pried loose. Sifting through this mockery of a truth-seeking exercise, it was clear one could still spend hours dismantling each fictitious claim, every sly defamation and every accusation of ideological deviance (okay, guilty as charged on that one). But that would be as captivating as reviewing the fine print of a vacuum cleaner warranty.
It's Really Not About You
Yet, that's when the first insight struck. Reading through the file, you realise you're stepping into a different reality. You are entering their world—a world perfectly captured in Anna Funder's observations on the East German communist state: a closed system of thought, complete with its punishments for any transgressions, both real and imagined, against the ideological monoculture. This is a realm of paranoia, riddled with projection, and steeped in self-righteousness, hypocrisy and double standards. The Stasi analogy may break down, but the East German one holds.
When you realise this, things fall into place. Those who inhabit this world exist in a fortress of certainty, convinced of their moral rectitude yet blind to their own biases and performative political posturing, where any divergence from a progressive orthodoxy is regarded with suspicion and hostility. In this worldview, the notion of a university as a genuine marketplace of ideas is entirely alien. Yet, when you step back and see it laid bare, there's something poetic—perhaps even karmic: you realise that this document is not about you. It's all about them.
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic. Between 2016 and 2019 he was Head of the Department of War Studies at King's College London. The full text of 'What I Learned in My College Stasi File' was originally published by the Committee for Academic Freedom, which can be found here. His most recent book, A Front Row Seat at the End of History: The Untimely Essays of David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, 1999-2024, has recently been published by Bruges Group Publishing.
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