The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is an independent UK body which provides “quality assurance” for university teaching. 98 per cent of UK universities are paid “members” of the QAA and receive its advice. The QAA issues “Subject Benchmark Statements”, which provide “general guidance” for the design of academic courses.
In March 2022, the QAA began to revise its Subject Benchmark Statements to consider “wider social goals”. These goals include “equality, diversity, and inclusivity”.
The equality, diversity, and inclusivity sections of the revised statements frequently instruct academics to include contentious and dubiously relevant political topics in their teaching. Thus, the Classics statement asserts that the link between Classics and “imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and class division” is “unavoidable” for university Classics courses. The Geography statement encourages courses to “stimulate critical thinking informed by a variety of progressive theoretical perspectives. These include, but are not limited to, theoretical perspectives from critical theory, critical race theory, decoloniality, disability studies, feminist, queer, and science and technology studies”. There is no mention of alternatives to any of these perspectives.
Some statements are ostensibly descriptive. The History statement reads: “the wider community of historians… engages closely with work to decolonise the curriculum, including challenging Eurocentric conceptual frameworks”. Ditto Anthropology: “Anthropologists today are committed to… critique… the structures of power which create and maintain inequality around the world”. As descriptive statements, these are patently false. Some historians do not wish to challenge “Eurocentric conceptual frameworks” and some anthropologists are interested in things other than inequality. These descriptive claims conceal evaluative claims about what academics should do or teach – while simultaneously eliding the fact that any academics act otherwise.
Naturally, academics can link Classics to white supremacy, or introduce critical race theory into Geography courses, if they so wish. This is a decision for individual academics. It is entirely wrong for a centralised body, such as the QAA, to advise that courses must include topics which are subject to substantial academic debate.
The statements also baldly assert a number of highly contentious claims. The Languages, Cultures and Societies statement claims that “course design inevitably involves selecting, and therefore privileging, certain types of knowledge and behaviour and implicitly discriminating against others”. The Geography statement asserts that “the following core values underpin geography’s inclusive learning community… embracing and valuing plurality of knowledges”. Whether there are “pluralities of knowledge” is a disputed philosophical topic. The Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research statement declares that mathematics is “not neutral”, while the statement for Chemistry demands that “Chemistry… should be culturally and ethically neutral”.
The Psychology statement declares that “Under the Equality Act 2010, education providers have a duty to embed equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) into all learning opportunities”. This is a total invention. The Equality Act mentions no such duty, nor can it be inferred from anything else it says. Such statements create a culture of orthodoxy. They also makes a mockery of the QAA’s claim to be “politically neutral”.
Each Subject Benchmark Statement was created with the help of an “Advisory Group”. A person-specification for members of these advisory groups, dated October 2023, requires members to have “understanding” of equality, diversity, and inclusivity, but makes no mention of academic freedom.
The QAA’s review of the Subject Benchmark Statements is ongoing. Subjects reviewed in 2024-2025 will include Philosophy, Physics, Music and Education Studies. Fortunately, universities can cancel their subscription to QAA without serious consequences; Oxford University has already done so. Oxford’s Chancellor, Lord Patten, had this to say in a House of Lords debate in 2022:
The QAA—the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education— …only recently produced advice on the curriculum which was like a parody of an article in the Daily Mail. Among other things, it included the decolonisation of not just music…but the maths curriculum. Clearly, the people who wrote it had never heard of Arabs, Indians or the Mayan civilisation, which was doing advanced mathematics before Christopher Columbus arrived. All that any university has to do is what Oxford has done—withdraw its subscription to the QAA, which is now pretty well on its last legs anyway. I regard the QAA’s advice to universities as in many respects the most dangerous assault in the last few years on freedom of expression and research at universities….Universities should denounce it with great enthusiasm.