Almost 200 professors and lecturers have written to the Government criticising DEI plans to link research funding to “robustly” promoting diversity, saying they are a serious risk to research quality and academic freedom. The Times has the story.

Senior academics are demanding that Ministers ditch a new diversity-related funding plan which they warn poses a “serious risk” to high-quality research at Britain’s leading universities.

Almost 200 professors and lecturers, including a Nobel laureate and seven fellows of the Royal Society, have written to the Government demanding a rethink of plans to link research funding to diversity and inclusion on campus.

The group claims the new system will undermine academic freedom and create an “unproductive university bureaucracy” at a time when higher education budgets are already stretched.

Under the proposed changes universities will have to show how they are “robustly” promoting diversity and inclusion in order to obtain up to £2 billion of taxpayer funding for research.

In particular, they will have to report the percentage of black, Asian and mixed-race academics eligible for funding and provide evidence of the “percentage of promotion success per under-represented groups”.

Other criteria for funding include “documented evidence” that leadership of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives is “appropriately recognised”, and monitoring and assessing the “effectiveness of policies and initiatives to address underrepresentation and inequalities”.

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 which awards 85% of funding based on assessment of the output and impact of university work.

“These proposals pose serious risks to research integrity and quality, to academic freedom and to institutional autonomy and diversity,” they write.

“They will also lead to an unwanted increase in unproductive university bureaucracy at the expense of practical support for staff.

“At a time of great economic difficulty for higher education, tying the hands of institutions in ways which will constrain innovation is unhelpful. Research England has not consulted meaningfully with the academic community and its decision making has been far from transparent.”

Worth reading in full.