This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Are you good enough to work in academia? Bin your CV and burn your books: we mean, are you good enough? If you want to join us at Progress College, we need proof you are morally aligned. Of what avail are academic credentials before unconditional devotion to the Holy Trinity of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?
Britain 2025: hundreds of academic posts stipulate a “commitment to EDI” as an essential criterion for appointment. For many, mere doctrinal belief sufficeth not. All applicants for senior jobs at University College London must evidence a “demonstrable contribution to advancing EDI”. The appointed senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich will, as a “core requirement”, “promote the University’s policies on EDI”.
Don’t think your subject area will provide cover. The would-be lecturer in mathematics at St Andrews must submit a “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Statement”. The prospective assistant professor in financial law at Durham University will need to submit an “EDI & values statement” outlining the “work which you have been involved in which demonstrates your commitment to EDI and our values”.
The Russell Group is riddled with such rot. Even at Cambridge, applicants for two assistant professorships earlier this year were asked to submit “an EDI statement outlining what Equality, Diversity and Inclusion means to you”. This personal reflection was to fill two A4 pages.
Not only are these concepts notoriously slippery, but we are in an age of acronymous legerdemain. For more than 20 UK universities, the E of EDI has re-emerged as Equity (of outcome), rather than Equality (of opportunity). Several institutions hover mid-metamorphosis at “EEDI”.
These mandated declarations of faith are not simply a bureaucratic hurdle of saying “the right thing”. They are a sad symptom of how embedded the EDI agenda has become. Leaving aside the true-believer dogmatists, an institutional feedback loop whirrs away: senior management strive to collect the baubles of do-goodery du jour: the Race Equality Charter, Stonewall Workplace Equality Index, Athena SWAN.
The axe-grinders on the committee know which candidates will fall in line
In turn, those quangos demand ever more evidence of yet better behaviour. But since it’s illegal to appoint by discriminating against race, sex or sexuality, other signals need to be used to undermine merit-based selection.
Calling for these statements and tying them — vaguely, yet essentially — to the academic appointments process encourages those signed up to the progressive agenda to show their hand.
The sharp-elbowed axe-grinders on the committee in search of young allies thus know which candidates will fall in line. Their actual statements never need be discussed. The same problems blight internal promotions: which biddable employees have “done the work”?
Meanwhile, UK Research and Innovation trumpets EEDI; applicants to the Arts and Humanities Research Council are asked “What approaches and activities do you have planned that will embed EDI into your proposed work?”; and the Research Excellence Framework, which calibrates university funding, is increasing its weighting to EDI, turbo-charging the problem. Only the heretic could oppose Equality, or Diversity, or Inclusion.
