February 10, 2025 - 7:00am
Just as DEI is being scaled back in American higher education, the UK is doubling down on it, much to the peril of academic freedom.
After a lengthy consultation period, conveniently timed to report after the election which brought Labour into office, guidance from Research England (which doles out over £2 billion in funding per year) has been released. It stipulates that its Research Excellence Framework (REF) will now grade university departments on their share of women and non-whites, promotion rates by race and sex, and how well they are training their staff in DEI ideology. All of which has nothing to do with research excellence.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a euphemism for woke cultural socialism. “Diversity and Equity” is about achieving equal outcomes and representation for minority identity groups through anti-white/male discrimination while “Inclusion” refers to censoring speech that offends the most sensitive members of such groups. When a staff member posts on social media against biological males in female sports, they are now more likely to be threatened or forced out for undermining “inclusion” and “diversity”, damaging their department’s precious reputation.
The REF is extremely important, not just because of the funding it gives to cash-starved universities whose only other income is from student fees, but because a department’s REF ranking is its most important esteem indicator. This is key for attracting top staff and students. As someone who chaired my department’s REF committee and has been on the committee several times, I can tell you that among status-conscious academics, the REF is king: most academics can teach, but few can produce world-leading research. The REF separates the wheat from the chaff. No wonder universities spent around £450 million preparing for REF 2021, £6,000 per staff member submitted. One result is that this causes a lot of competition among colleagues and some — especially those who are not productive researchers — resent it.
Egalitarians have been steadily chipping away at the traditional focus on individual research excellence. This may be because around three in four academics are on the Left, and those attracted into management positions on research councils tend to be activists who are especially imbued with progressive ideas about how bad competition is. Many are unproductive scholars who wish we could replace the focus on outputs and individual excellence with cultural socialist concerns such as equity and collaboration. Now this is going into overdrive.
In 2014, REF introduced a “holistic” scoring mechanism which allocated just 65% for research excellence based on articles and books, with 15% now given for research “environment” and 20% for “impact”. Some of this made sense in that “impact” is partly about showing that research is helping society or at least getting noticed (though this discouraged anything that went against Left-wing orthodoxy).
For instance, even though I could show that my work informed the UK’s academic freedom legislation — a clear-cut impact case — this was not submitted because this would have been marked down by Leftist reviewers who hated the Conservative Party and the bill. “Environment” was largely fluff: most departments got the same score apart from their ranking on their number of PhDs produced and the number of grants they won. In short, politics only entered scoring on the fringes.
The funding in 2021 increased DEI considerations somewhat and shaved academic excellence down to 60% weighting. The research environment now included a score for those who fostered diversity and wellbeing in hiring, promotion and research support. Meanwhile, in the heady days of George Floyd and #MeToo, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) documents witnessed a surge of DEI-talk, with “inclusion”, “diversity” and other social justice buzzwords taking off.
Research England’s latest announcement puts the process on steroids. The “environment” component has been increased to 25% and individual research excellence cut to 50%. With research environment, the emphasis is on team collaboration and interdisciplinarity regardless of whether this strangles research output. “Inclusivity” is now explicit: “Institution / unit tackles inequities in the research system and robustly addresses equality, diversity and inclusion across all of its activities.”
There will be mandatory reporting of the proportion of female and non-white participants, and their promotion rates. The drive to improve REF scores will now be used by radical activists in departments to demand quotas, which means discriminating against whites and men in hiring and promotion. Evidence from the US suggests this will involve hiring and promoting less qualified people, damaging excellence.
On the “Inclusion” side, the new REF criteria call for mandatory diversity training, a useless and counterproductive exercise which brooks no opposition, violating academics’ freedom of conscience. More ominously, the guidelines compel “evidence that leadership of EDI initiatives is appropriately recognised”. In other words, as long as you push DEI drivel on your colleagues, you don’t need to do any research.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. UKRI, the quango responsible for Research England’s £2.3 billion, has a budget of £9.2 billion, a sizeable increase over last year. Its research councils are shot through with DEI targets and initiatives, distorting research excellence just as badly as the REF will. It is not clear what can be done so long as UKRI remains quasi-independent of Government. Labour created this mess in the Tony Blair years, but don’t expect the party to end it.
Ultimately, one starts to wonder what sort of intervention will tame higher education’s rampant progressivism. Might the UK eventually see a Trump-DeSantis style government intervention from Reform UK at the next election?
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).
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SubscribeHappily I am long out of academics. However newly retiring friends would affirm what is written here. With the overabundance of university places (offering dubious courses) our young people are being badly served.
Afraid so
Young people are better off searching higher education opportunities elsewhere. Applies to mine without a doubt even if, big if, our next government applies common sense. It will take a generation to undo this rot, best case scenario.
This tyranny will as all tyrannies eat itself. Not on my timeline. Nowhere near soon enough
It’s just as bad in the professional departments of UK universities, if not worse. I might be reaching retirement age by the time this has blown itself out, which is a depressing thought. Unless, of course, I get cancelled for wrong-think in the meantime.
“Happily I am long out of academics.”
Me too!!
I know expressions like this cause a splash, and get some of the less bright tories excited, but it’s not really very descriptive. At the best, this is “socialism” for the well off only – it has little to do with helping the genuinely disadvantaged, most of whom will never get near university, let alone become academics.
It’s also an incongruous term to use for a moral system which is now far more characteristic of the elite, including the academic elite, than it is of ordinary working people. There have always been elite socialists, but their sympathies have been with the genuinely less well off. This is about the rules of the game within an elite club.
Champagne socialism?
I don’t think the Fabians’ sympathies were with the less well off – although tbf the Webbs, who thought the solution to poverty is sterilisation, were perhaps more sympathetic than GBS, who thought we should follow Stalin’s example and just kill a million or so poor people.
The middle class left has always been toxic. It’s always been about deflection. For twenty years since Brown rigged the housing market we’ve lived through the largest upward transfer of wealth in history and the ‘Left’ is devoting all its energy to championing half a dozen men who fantasise about being women.
GBS wrote some wonderful plays, but his political ideals fitted better in the sixth form and university than in real life.
It will take generations to rid ourselves of this curse.
I work with spreadsheets and “REF” is what comes up when at least one of your formulas can’t be calculated, rendering whatever you’ve been doing pointless until it’s fixed. It seems an apt comparison with this.
Universities here look more and more of a joke with every passing day. I’m torn on their inevitable downfall. On one level, it’ll be nothing less than they deserve, but on the other, these idiots will filter out into the real world and the lesser evil might be to contain them.
If modern universities didn’t exist we wouldn’t invent them in their current form. Digital communications have made the three- year degree obsolete. Why run up huge debts attending some thirteenth rate poly when you can go online and learn from the world’s greatest teachers? AI will make most of them completely redundant. Far-sighted politicians should already be working to dismantle them and the massive waste of resources they represent.
I don’t wholly agree with you on this. Good university teaching sets a framework for objective research and rational analysis. This is much harder to achieve online without the strong danger of indoctrination as opposed to creative reasoning. Of course, the ex-poly universities rarely achieve this level of teaching- their traditions are in training, not education. Increasingly, at the moment, even the top universities are tending towards training in Marxian thinking, pot-modernism, DEI and activism, bringing a conformity to subjectivity and irrationality.
Forgive me for not understanding your point about ex-poly universities. After more than three decades the overwhelming majority of those universities’ academic staff members have no roots whatsoever in polytechnic education, the change from poly to university status having occurred in 1992.
True to some extent, but they still often retain their special role in vocational training and consequently an ethos rather different from the traditional universities.
Just because your local club called itself Manchester City and claims to play in Premier League doesn’t make it true.
Failed bus conductor John Major renamed teaching colleges universities.
UK doesn’t need 145 universities.
50 good ones, mostly STEM would be enough.
The prognosis for a Trump-like roll-back of “woke cultural socialism” in Britain is a grim one. One difference between the UK and US that the commentariat always misses is that whereas the American middle class has only ever been at best 50% up its woke backside, in the UK (thanks to decades of BBC-iffication) the figure is probably nearer 75%. That’s a very lot of ‘opinion-forming classes’ to get brought back to the real world. The grim truth is that Britain’s simulcrum of a ‘democracy’ (basically a permanent civil service, quango, lawfare hegemony obscured behind a Starmer/Farage/Badenoch media entertainment sideshow) needs to fall apart before any real change can come. It will probably be ugly. (more expansive thoughts on this theme: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias)
Reform should not make the mistake —if it wins power at the next election— of seeking to directly strike down this nonesense without considering the resistence it will be able to mount. It will need to, first, legislate to remove the possibility of court challenge, leave human rights organizations and treaties that can be relied on in court, introduce legislation that allows them to terminate the contract of any civil servant…etc..etc.. Then purge DEI from the UK.
Just stop state funding of student loans and open UKRI research grants up to competition from foreign universities.
WTF does decolonise education mean?
Fewer white people, especially men.
Something to do with proctology perhaps.
First they come for the colons , then they come for the semicolons.
Finally , the commanists take over.
Very good!
Please correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think ‘executive orders’ like Trump’s are possible here, our PMs do not have that kind of power.
Actually your PMs have much more power, if they choose to wield it. As the leader of the legislative body and the executive,, a PM can get a lot done, IF they can hold their party together. There are very few checks on Parliament – most of them are self-imposed.
Executive orders don’t create laws They’re simply a policy statement on something the president is allow to set policy on, either via statute (a law established by Congress) or the Constitution. Of course, all presidents like to push the envelope on policy setting, so EOs are sometimes ruled unconstitutional if the court deems the president doesn’t have the authority.
The other big difference is federal bureaucracy vs your civil service. Your civil service is supposed to be run by an “impartial” managerial class that takes high level policy from the minsters and runs with it. In the US, political appointees are 2 and sometimes 3 levels deep (from the top). This gives a president much more ability to influence strategy and operations as well as policy. However, it also means it will swing wildly with a new president and our executive leaders don’t have much experience.
To be clear – while I prefer our system to a parliamentary democracy, there are tradeoffs. Our system is designed to be slow and plodding and places a strong emphasis on individual rights.
Last note – the American president is a virtual emperor when it comes to international relations – but that’s outside of the scope of this.
Thank you for that. Well, now I know.
However, unless our PMs have a competent and co-operative civil service to push through their instructions the power they have does not mean as much as it might.
Fire them all.
In the USA, Trump is abolishing this form of ‘Progressive Racism’ in the bureaucracy and many companies are following suit. it feels like Christmas…back to ‘common sense’ – a breathe of fresh air. The UK won’t do well in the coming years if they abandon ‘merit’ and competition. By definition, the UK will become second rate,
Indeed, Cathy! And, in addition, how on earth do you actually define the ‘under-represented groups’ in whose favour you are going to discriminate? I have knowledge of, for example, middle-class professional parents of a mixed-race child gaming the system to secure an internship for her on the ‘ethnic minority’ ticket. We need to get back to a pure merit-based system, which will, as it has in the past, encourage people in those ‘under-represented groups’ to aspire and achieve rather than assume that they will get favourable treatment purely because of their sex or skin colour.
The UK won’t become second rate; it has been so for over a decade.
Here’s the question I want the answer to.
When the REF check the percentage of women and non-whites (plus whatever other in groups they’re pushing) in university departments, will they be checking simply that some arbitrary lower threshold has been met ? Or will they also check against an upper limit ? What if a department is employing 70% non-whites ? At what point (if any) does exceeding the target a) become a problem and b) get sanctioned ?
Yes, Peter! It’s appalling that so few white athletes appear in our teams in the track events at the Olympic Games. That must be racism, surely?
Did you miss the point or ignore it? The track team is built on pure merit; this is anything but that.
You know the answer to that question.
It is always one way traffic.
Ayn Rand couldn’t have conjured a more corrupt, self-dealing, and excellence crushing regimen of politicized bureaucratic tyranny. And this is all real.
Once a grift begins, it only grows.
British universities have sold their academic souls to the DEI contagion. With their corridors and noticeboards replete with advertisements for workshops on ‘Toxic Masculinity’, ‘White Privilege’, etc., they are hotbeds of misandrist feminism that drives the Woke agenda thats seek to replace men, with evident success, in academic delivery, student recruitment and management. The irony is that most of the female academics, administrators, students and managers are White middle-class! I couldn’t extract myself from their cauldron fast enough!
Tragically, it seems that the decline of our great universities has reached a tipping point, from which recovery will take decades if indeed it is possible. How different it was in the past. I loved my experience teaching in a ‘real’ university from the late-1960s to the early-1980s. But how glad I am that I made a mid-career change; I could not stomach trying to teach and do research in the sick and vicious environment of today.
And how can a body supposedly passing out money for research impose criteria only half of which is excellence in research? It may be a quango but I can’t believe that Government is powerless to force it to focus on the purpose for which it was established. This nonsense, however, will be the death-knell of a tradition of outstanding research which over a long period of time propelled British universities to a globally recognised peak. That peak has already passed and the way things are going, our universities will soon be little more than a joke in the common rooms of overseas seats of learning.
This demand for so-called collaboration helps explain why school teachers insist on students (in my part of Canada) constantly doing ‘group projects’ and being part of school-based ‘chat groups’ in all subjects instead of independent work. Everyone in the group gets the same mark regardless of individual input.
Our kids are being trained to group-think and for academic & personal non-excellence, or as the late great John Taylor Gatto put it ‘dumbing us down’.
“There will be mandatory reporting of the proportion………..” That would be nice but I doubt it would be honest.I would love a proponent of this guff to actually say what percentages they are talking about and do they actually know that this country doesn’t look like it is portrayed in the media?
“Research England”? When did it become fashionable in academia to place adjectives after the nouns they modify? And yes, “England” used this way becomes an attributive adjective. If the members of these organizations can’t even use the English language correctly at the most fundamental level of grammar, it’s no wonder they’re seduced by bad ideas.
University degrees are a product that’s value and quality has been falling while it’s cost has dramatically increased. Men have been voting with their feet on this for many years – to the point where they risk becoming female coded. Graduates are starting to find out that ‘woke’ degrees and woke universities are sending a negative signal to employers. Add to this a falling birth rate and there will be some natural corrections coming to the industry in any event.
The worm has turned.
Division
Exclusion
Insanity