Almost 200 university professors and lecturers, including a Nobel laureate and seven fellows of the Royal Society, have written to the government urging ministers to ditch plans to link research funding to diversity and inclusion on campus. The group claims the new system will undermine academic freedom, create an “unproductive university bureaucracy” at a time when higher-education budgets are already stretched and pose a “serious risk” to high-quality research.
At present, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the mechanism that determines how £2 billion a year of taxpayer money is allocated for academic research – ranks universities on three weighted criteria: research output (60 per cent), research impact (25 per cent) and research environment (15 per cent).
Academics have previously warned that the “impact” and “environment” yardsticks already prize ideological concerns over intellectual rigour – and lead to universities prioritising projects that increase their chances of getting money over free, individual academic pursuits.
Under the new plans, however, this dynamic is set to intensify, with universities having to show have to show that they’re “robustly” promoting equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in order to obtain funding.
Research output (weighted at 65 per cent when the REF was introduced in 2014) will be downgraded to 50 per cent, while a new “people, culture and environment” category will rise to 25 per cent, expanding the EDI requirements. In particular, universities will have to show the percentage of black, Asian and mixed-race academics who would benefit from any funding, and provide evidence of the “percentage of promotion success per under-represented groups”.
But in their letter the academics say Research England, which is drawing up the plans, has provided no “coherent justification” for changing the current system. Instead, “these proposals pose serious risks to research integrity and quality, to academic freedom and to institutional autonomy and diversity”. They also say that “Research England has not consulted meaningfully with the academic community and its decision-making has been far from transparent”.
The letter is signed by Sir Gregory Winter, the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. Other signatories include more than 20 Oxford and Cambridge professors and seven fellows of the British Academy. It’s been backed by the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was forced out of her job at Sussex University for her gender-critical views after a three-year campaign of bullying and character assassination.
And, if anything, the briefing document which accompanies the letter is even more damning:
Suggested qualitative evidence includes ‘Pre- and post-training assessments (e.g. on EDI principles for members of assessment panels, juries, committees and other decision-making bodies, implicit bias)’. Yet there is no evidence that such training is effective. There is no acknowledgement of the contested nature of many aspects of EDI training, with implications for academic freedom.… As there are serious concerns about the partisan nature of some EDI initiatives, making research funding contingent on taking a particular approach to EDI risks violating the impartiality of academic research.…
Overall, the assessment framework includes a number of criteria whose merit might be legitimately debated.… This suggests that Research England has pre-judged some approaches as ‘best practice’ when they are in fact extremely contentious. If the assessment incorrectly judges which approaches work best, it runs the risk of actively harming the quality of research environments. University departments will effectively be prevented from making their own decisions on such matters given the risk to their REF rankings if they do not comply.
The composition of the panel that has been tasked with assessing PCE [people, culture and environment] suggests a lack of balance. It includes a number of members who advocate for highly contested frameworks such as decolonisation and gender-identity theory while there does not seem be any member opposing these frameworks. Concerningly, one member has openly used derogatory slurs to refer to colleagues who hold legally protected gender-critical beliefs. Moreover, the panel does not appear to have been selected because of their track record in promoting cultures of research excellence. It is unclear, for example, why their views on what constitutes best practice in university strategy should be considered superior to those of the departments they are judging.
The document concludes by arguing that: “Equality work in universities should be regulated by existing equality law and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which was expressly created for this purpose. There is no obvious basis for Research England to dictate the terms of this work.”
Needless to say, the FSU agrees with this assessment. If universities want to remain centres of intellectual excellence, they should be judged on the quality of their research, not their adherence to ideological litmus tests.
And with so many of our cases stemming from workplaces that champion EDI policies, we also know all too well how easily these policies can be used to police lawful speech and suppress academic freedom.
More on the story here. To read the academics’ letter and briefing document, click here.
