Professor Norman Fenton speaks with Professor Diane Rasmussen about his new book, The Capture of Academia: How Universities Shape Power, Silence Dissent, and Influence Society. Sharing common ground as former senior academics who lost their university careers for opposing popular stances, they speak about the hidden corruption that drives today’s British universities.
Professor Fenton is Emeritus Professor of Risk at Queen Mary University of London and founder of Agenda Ltd, a company that specialises in Bayesian network tools for risk modelling and decision support. He has previously been interviewed on UK Column to discuss skewed Covid vaccine data (2022) and, later, to explain how questioning the official Covid narrative effectively ended his academic career (2023).
In this 2026 interview, Professor Fenton says he went “from respected professor to academic pariah” for his unpopular views. He speaks about the requirement for university staff to follow the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) cultural Marxist agenda that pervades today’s UK university system. One example can be found in the University of Cambridge’s Behavioural Attributes Framework, which requires all staff to adhere to “the principles of diversity and inclusion”. He believes this mandate helps explain why Jason Arday received his professorial appointment at Cambridge. Professor Fenton explains how these DEI mandates provide preferential treatment to groups with certain characteristics while it excludes others, and how they deny diversity of thought.
He also discusses the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a bureaucratic, expensive, and corrupt process that claims to assess “the quality of research in UK higher education institutions”. In the next REF exercise (2029), 30% of “research quality” will be evaluated based on the incorporation of DEI principles into the research. This corruption extends into scientific peer review; only grant proposals and papers that support agendas such as Net Zero and Agenda 2030 tend to be reviewed favourably.
Professor Fenton can be found on X, on YouTube, and via his website. He runs a popular Substack, ‘Where Are the Numbers?’, with Professor Martin Neil. Professors Fenton and Neil also co-authored the groundbreaking book Fighting Goliath: Exposing the Flawed Science and Statistics behind the COVID-19 Event.