The university could be the last bastion of woke
Matt Goodwin's Bad Education paints a damning picture of life inside the academy.
Woke advertising seems to be falling out of fashion. Multinational corporations are dropping mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training programmes. In the US, President Trump has recently signed executive orders ending ‘radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing’.
Yet, at the very moment the elite obsession with woke ideas seems to be losing its grip on wider society in the West, the UK higher-education sector appears to be more in thrall to it than ever. Indeed, universities that fail to pledge allegiance to the cult of diversity may soon face cuts to their research budgets.
Currently, British universities receive £2 billion a year of taxpayer funding to support academic research. This comprises a significant proportion of their revenue – second only to student tuition fees at many institutions. Allocated according to a Research Excellence Framework, this money has always come with strings attached. But under new guidelines published this month, universities will now need to prove they are ‘robustly’ tackling inequality and promoting diversity and inclusion before receiving funding. This will be done by, among other things, recording the numbers of black, Asian and mixed-race academics eligible for research funding and demonstrating the success of staff from ‘under-represented groups’ when it comes to applying for promotion.
This latest demand on those seeking research funding has nothing to do with their subject expertise and runs counter to both academic freedom and the pursuit of intellectual excellence. It simply adds to the myriad ways in which every aspect of higher education is geared around promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Even now, academic-funding bodies, such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, require applicants to submit DEI action plans. UK Research and Innovation describes equality, diversity and inclusion as ‘integral’ to its ‘vision and mission’.
Yet, as political commentator and former academic Matthew Goodwin explores in his new book, Bad Education, too few working within universities are willing to push back against the politicisation of higher education. As a result, ‘our universities are no longer interested in their original purpose’, he writes, ‘they are no longer prioritising the search for truth, learning, and evidence over dogma’. They have been captured by a ‘new dominant ideology’, he argues, which has been imposed on staff, students and administrators, and now fully permeates all aspects of academic life.
Goodwin describes this ideology as a belief system, ‘completely focussed on, if not obsessed with, its core, guiding claim that all racial, sexual and gender minorities must be considered sacred and untouchable and must be protected from “emotional harm”, while the majority must be treated with suspicion, if not contempt, even by themselves’. Academics and students who imbibe this outlook, he tells us, ‘see Western societies as being defined by ongoing, never-ending, zero-sum battles for power between minority and majority identity groups’. They consider it the duty of state institutions, including universities, to intervene and redress historical wrongs by exercising discrimination in the present. The result, Goodwin explains, has been to ‘dumb down intellectual standards on campus, prioritising this unscientific political dogma over evidence, rigour, logic and reason, creating a world in which everything from university reading lists to academic hires becomes an openly political project’.