Two recent stories to emerge from Cardiff University could serve as a troubling parable for all that’s going wrong in British higher education. Either that, or as a parody.
In story one, the university has announced plans to cut 400 academic jobs – around 7 per cent of the total – along with entire courses in nursing, music, ancient history, theology and modern languages.
In story two, there’s now a mandatory EDI module for all first-year Cardiff students where they’re instructed on how to speak (and therefore think) about politically contentious ideas.
In other words, at the same time as the university is trying to get rid of academics who could perhaps teach students to think critically so as to challenge received wisdoms, it’s somehow found the money to help EDI zealots impose them as unquestionable dogma.
To be fair, the module – influenced by critical race theory – is nothing if not thorough. First, students are given a quiz to “explore [their] experiences of privilege and marginalisation” and to answer the burning question, “How privileged are you?” To find out, they’re faced with nine statements, which they must rate as either true or false. Examples include “I rarely feel hyper-vigilant or anxious when I walk alone” and “I feel the media usually portrays my identity in a positive light”.
Once the quiz is complete, their level of privilege is turned into a handy pie-chart presented to each of them. The students then move on to a section about such unacceptable “microaggressions” as calling someone articulate or complimenting them on their English.
In a final section on “inclusive language”, students are taught the rules of EDI-speak that they’re required to follow. Here, the course materials contain a stern warning against the use of certain idioms because of their “origin story”: “In the English language, many of those origin stories are based in ableism, like ‘the blind leading the blind’, or racism, like ‘he’s a slave driver’, and in sexism, like ‘man up’ or ‘like a girl’.”
Also to be avoided are colloquial phrases such as “kill two birds with one stone”, “piece of cake” or “break a leg”, on the rather curious grounds for a British university that these phrases are examples of “very British English” – the problem being that they “would not translate well” into other languages or cultures.
As the prohibitions continue to pile up, participants are cautioned against derogatory terms like “crazy” and told to avoid assumptions as much as possible, including that “everyone has biological parents” (not a crazy ludicrous assumption surely).
Much of this might seem merely silly – but, given that completion of the module is compulsory for first-year students, it helps set the tone for an environment on campus that’s clearly hostile to free speech. As Dr Edward Skidelsky – Director of the Committee for Academic Freedom – warns, Cardiff’s EDI training is “calculated to turn every casual conversation into a political minefield”. And of course, as Dr Skidelsky also puts it: “It is not the job of universities to be policing the everyday language of their students.”
Apparently, then, EDI initiatives don’t feature in Cardiff University’s proposed cuts – the scale of which has come as a shock to its academics. Speaking anonymously, one told the Guardian: “The university management has kept pretending everything was OK, although no one with a brain believed them. Anyone knows that in a crisis you have to act early to avoid cutting too deeply. They’ve ducked that. Now they’ve gone into panic mode.”
According to Cefin Campbell, Plaid Cymru’s Spokesperson for Education: “Four hundred jobs lost at Wales’s biggest university will have a devastating impact and damage Wales’s reputation as a nation of learning… And the knock-on effects will be devastating for the city of Cardiff, the wider region, Wales and our future generations.”
Still, as long as nobody describes Cardiff University’s behaviour as the blind leading the blind…
