Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to part five of this year's Paul Foot Award mini-series.

Let's find out who today's shortlistee is.

So I'm Aaron Waller Walker. I'm a reporter at Liberty Investigates.

I worked on this investigation with my editor, Harriet Clugston,

and in partnership with the Metro, Guardian and Sky News.

Our investigation revealed what a teaching

union described as a worsening crackdown on Gaza activism at UK universities, which included

close collaboration with the police, use of private intelligence companies, and a large number

of disciplinary investigations against students and staff. So how did this story first come to your attention?

So Liberty investigates our missions to kind of plug gaps in UK media coverage in an area

that we were looking to pivot into was threats to the rights of protesters.

In April, May, last year, Harriet and I were discussing the kind of shocking images that were

coming out of the US of protesters being tear gassed, academics being handcuffed and tackled discussing the kind of shocking images that were coming out of the US of protesters

being tear gassed, academics being handcuffed and tackled to the ground at the same time that

the encampment movement was spreading to the UK.

Harriet thought that we should be keeping an eye on this, and I suggested that perhaps we

could submit information requests to universities for their correspondence with the police

and also dig into kind of

disciplinaries that might be happening against students or referrals to the prevent extremism program.

Okay. That's a very clever way of doing it through Freedom of Information Request for that specific

correspondence. And what did those requests reveal? So we submitted them to all UK universities, and we hadn't really submitted these

...