Academic freedom can't exist alongside DEI

Universities that prioritise 'inclusion' will never defend free speech

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

The inauguration of Donald Trump is being talked up as the end of the DEI era. The ‘vibe shift’ is symbolised by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ditching Facebook’s censorious ‘fact-checkers’ and calling for more ‘masculine energy’ in the workplace. But the corporate turn against woke began before Trump’s electoral success and Zuck’s enlightenment.

In the US, many companies seem to have either learnt from the backlash to Bud Light’s partnership with transgender Dylan Mulvaney, or - more likely - were confronted by a tougher post-pandemic economic reality. As a result, over the past year, big names such as Ford, Harley-Davidson and Motorola have rowed back on preaching marketing campaigns. Some have even dropped hiring practices that privilege identity over achievement along with staff diversity training requirements.

Zuckerberg now wants us to believe that it was all Sheryl’s fault - that Lean In feminist Sheryl Sandberg was responsible for Facebook’s inclusivity drives. Apparently, she was busy instigating a regime of woke censorship while he was focused on the manly tech stuff. I’m not convinced.

The corporate world wants us to believe it has experienced a Damascene conversion and turned its back on promoting diversity, equity, inclusion; meeting ever tougher enivironmental, social and governance targets; donating to Black Lives Matter, and flying the trans-inclusive flag during Pride month. But there are plenty of institutions where the tyranny of woke is alive and well: most of them are called universities.

Championed by umbrella organisations like AdvanceHE and Universities UK, the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion on British campuses continues apace, even as academic departments are being shut down and professors are facing redundancy. Pronoun badges, Pride flags and library displays for Black History Month are the most visible signs of the work of DEI officers.

But these outward symbols are relatively easy to ignore. Far more worrying is the influence DEI departments have over teaching - the core practice of the university. AdvanceHE highlights the importance of a ‘social justice approach’ to ‘inclusive assessment’ where students ‘co-construct’ not just the knowledge they will be assessed on, but the form that this assessment will take. It champions an ‘inclusive curriculum’ to tackle the ‘Black and Minority Ethnic attainment gap’. In practice, this often means ‘decolonising the curriculum’ by tearing up lectures that focus on the work of dead, white men and paying homage to alternative forms of knowledge production.

Individual lecturers should, of course, be free to decide whether some or all of these approaches work for them and the discipline they teach. But the problem is that when it comes to the promotion of DEI in universities, compliance is often compulsory. Templates for teaching programmes compel academics to state how their lectures, seminars and assessments have been decolonised and are fully inclusive. With trigger warnings added to over 1,000 books, mandatory training courses for staff and even students, and proscribed lists of ‘approved’ vocabulary, the campus ‘vibe’ is still very much set to ‘woke’. And when inclusion enters the university, academic freedom departs.

Academic freedom and equity, diversity and inclusion policies are incompatible. The right of some on campus to argue for women’s sex-based rights conflicts with the demand of others that trans-identifying males should have access to women’s toilets. The right of academics to determine their own reading list conflicts with institutional requirements to decolonise. Institutions cannot do both. They must pick a side. And every single time they come down on the side of inclusion rather than academic freedom. Rather than remaining neutral, universities fly the trans-inclusive Pride flag. There has been no ‘vibe shift’ on campus.

The case of Martin Speake illustrates the current climate in many universities. Speake, an internationally renowned saxophonist, had been teaching at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London for 24 years. In response to an email asking for staff and student feedback on his school’s equality and diversity policy, Speake said he did not agree that black musicians were discriminated against in the UK’s jazz scene. In his lengthy reply, Speake argued that ‘critical race theory is divisive and dangerous’.

Students posted the contents of Speake’s email online and then organised a boycott of his classes in protest at his views. At this point, an institution that supported academic freedom, would have stepped in and defended Speake’s right to express his beliefs. But this did not happen. Instead, his school released a statement praising the students and expressing ‘how in awe we are of [their] sense of community and solidarity with each other’. After this, colleagues, fellow musicians and venues cut ties with Speake. His position at Trinity Laban, with no students to teach and facing continuing accusations of racism, became untenable. Speake eventually resigned and has now filed a claim for constructive dismissal.

Speake’s case shows that academic freedom dies on contact with institutions that promote diversity, equity and inclusion as their core values. It also shows that, despite a corporate turn against woke, such values continue to dominate academia. Yet another cohort of university students is being pushed to take on board views that are grounded not in intellectual freedom but in critical race theory and gender ideology.

Today’s university students are tomorrow’s teachers, lawyers and managers. For this reason, we need to be sceptical of the corporate turn against woke. A change of President means it is now in Mark Zuckerberg’s best interests to pin the blame for Facebook’s diversity obsession on his Chief Operating Officer. But if his commitment to DEI was only ever skin deep, why should we believe that his rejection of it now is also anything other than performative?

Getting DEI out of corporations is certainly a good start. But the era of woke will not truly be over until universities reject its authoritarian and discriminatory practices in favour of academic freedom.