So far this year I have had three invitations to act as external examiner for a doctoral thesis. I accepted all three, but it appears that I won’t be doing any of them. Why?

I regularly act as an external examiner for taught courses in my field, and for PhD theses. I enjoy doing this; it’s rewarding and stimulating and, although not highly paid, it is part of the reciprocal activity – like reviewing books and articles – without which academic life would seize up. Increasingly, however, I am being asked to produce my passport in order to be appointed. Until recently this was an exceptional request, and my refusal to comply was accepted, if not with good grace. On one occasion the viva was arranged, I had read the thesis and drafted my report when I saw the request. The university at first insisted that there was no alternative, but eventually backed down.

This year, however, three universities have de-appointed me when I explained why I would not comply with the request, even though in all three cases the viva date had been provisionally agreed and the thesis submitted. In all three cases it was then necessary for my colleagues to identify and appoint an alternative external examiner, with the result being a very long delay for the student.

So why are they asking to see my papers, and why am I refusing? The procedure seems to be one driven by HR within universities, and usually attributed to UKBA requirements to demonstrate that all employees have the right to work in the UK. One or two have said that the new procedures follow discussions between Universities UK and UKBA in 2010; but many universities (including my own) do not follow this procedure.

The legal position, as I understand it, is that an employer who does not check an employee’s right to work in the UK has no defence if the employee subsequently turns out to be working illegally, and therefore it is reasonable to carry out whatever checks appear to be necessary. But think about it: the overwhelming majority of external examiners are already employed full-time at UK universities, and can therefore be assumed to be working legally in the UK. Realistically, if it suddenly turned out that I was working here illegally, the authorities would be very interested in talking to my main employer (who of course has a record of my passport details). But would they also want to track down every university for whom I had been an external examiner, or every publisher for whom I had reviewed a book proposal? Clearly the procedure is absurd as well as being a nuisance for everyone. It has been applied unthinkingly on the basis of new procedures for permanent or casual employees, without reflecting on whether it is actually necessary. In any case, an external examiner can’t be an employee of the university awarding the degree, because then she/he would be ineligible to be an external examiner.

But why am I refusing to comply? Surely it is only a minor inconvenience, not worth making a fuss over and thereby causing problems for colleagues (academics and administrators) and especially students at a very sensitive time? In my case, it is because I think it is important to stand up to petty regulation of this kind, to stand up against the mindset that says we should meekly comply with the demands of ‘authority’ without questioning them. I also think it is worth resisting, wherever we can, the encroaching demand to ‘show our papers’ in a variety of circumstances. I have valued living in a country where people have been able to go about their business without being checked on, called upon to prove who we are and to do as we are told, and I am angry to see this being eroded. Others share my view: a letter to The Guardian in April 2009, signed by 37 senior academics, called for a boycott, and there has been similar correspondence more recently in the Times Higher Education Supplement. It has not caught on yet, but some of us are still trying.

Universities are terrified of UKBA, especially since the punishment of London Met last year, and have implemented new processes for monitoring students, such as weekly signing in (which of course proves virtually nothing). I have a PhD student from Iran who came here to escape from state surveillance and is seriously upset at being subject to it here. Another, from East Africa, took a month’s holiday simply to have a break from signing in; she continued working throughout. It is partly because of them that I am choosing to be awkward. I have also asked my own university to review the appropriateness of these arrangements, which they are doing, and I attempt to get the requirement waived for my students as often as possible.

When I originally asked our own Research Degrees Office if we made similar requests of external examiners, the answer was “of course not – they’d tell us to get lost”. Maybe it’s time we all told them to get lost...