Foreign spies are watching you, Mi5 tells universities

Mi5 have warned university leaders that foreign spies could be watching them and to improve their defenses against Chinese coercion.

More than 70 vice-chancellors were called to a meeting with the intelligence agency last week and told to report foreign interference, intimidation and censorship from ‘hostile states’ to security services.

Beijing and other foreign powers are trying to influence university research and teaching around sensitive subjects, Sir Ken McCallum said.

These subjects include issues like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Uighur oppression, Tibet and Taiwan, the university bosses were told at the briefing, The Time reported.

Staff can be intimidated or approached through networking sites by people acting on behalf of foreign states and telling them to shut down research on topics that make authoritarian regimes ‘feel uncomfortable’. They could also be paid off, McCallum said.

More covert methods include state-sanctioned operatives cozying up to staff to establish themselves as business or academic partners keen to foster research.

Once this relationship is established, it can then turn nasty, McCallum warned. One example is so-called lawfare, in which universities are threatened with costly legal action to put them off teaching or researching certain subjects.

The UK government has committed £3million to develop a secure platform for vice-chancellors and designated university security leaders to report such behaviour.

Sir Ken McCallum delivers the annual Director General’s Speech at Thames House, October 2025

Those at the meeting were also told they can share their personal email address with experts at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) for high level protection. These experts will warm them of suspicious activity.

The NCSC went further and offered ‘personal internet protection’ to counter highly personalised cyber attacks known as spear-phishing to get people to give up sensitive data.

The Department for Education is also setting up an advisory service to train and advise threatened academics. 

Dan Jarvis, the security minister, told The Times that enemies ‘seek to undermine British interests’ and ‘foreign interference has operated in the shadows of our universities and political institutions’.

He said: ‘By launching a direct reporting route and drawing up plans for an advisory body, we are giving our institutions a straight line to security experts to report interference. We are making the UK the hardest possible target for those who seek to exploit our freedoms.’

One example pointed to at the meeting several times was at Sheffield Hallam University, which was criticised for shutting down work on the allegations of forced labour in the Xinjiang region.

Dan Jarvis speaking at Mansion House in London, December 2025

It emerged that the university was concerned her research would reduce the number of Chinese students coming to learn there, The Times reported, so Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery, filed a lawsuit against them.

The university apologised but denied that the halting of her research was to protect the lucrative inflow of Chinese students.

Beijing has rejected the allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang, dismissing them as a smear campaign attempting to damage China’s reputation.