A recent study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) has found that EDI training often has counterproductive and negative effects. This is yet another good reason for cash-strapped universities across the UK to scrap many of these initiatives and to prioritise their academic departments instead.
EDI programmes have become an almost universal part of higher education in the UK, with entire departments often devoted to maintaining them. According to freedom of information requests sent by Alumni for Free Speech, 42 of the UK’s leading universities spend over £19.5 million a year on EDI staff and external advisors. UCL alone spends £1 million a year on these initiatives.
Given this level of investment, you might at least hope that these programmes are achieving their stated goal of fostering equity, diversity and inclusion. However, the NCRI’s new study indicates that EDI training actually amplifies “hostile attribution bias […] perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
The study collates the results of several similar but distinct experiments, which measured the effect of EDI training material on students’ attitudes towards people of colour, perceptions of racism or bigotry in various situations, and willingness to punish those perceived to harbour prejudice.
Being a US-based think tank, the NCRI conducted the study amongst undergraduate students from American universities, and relied primarily on EDI training material from US institutions. Nevertheless, the results are striking, and may be instructive for UK universities as well.
In one of the more notable studies, students from Rugters University were split into two groups and exposed to different sets of reading material. The first (control) group read neutral material on US corn production. The other (test) group read anti-racist material from Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and other EDI authors. Both groups were subsequently asked to evaluate the following scenario:
“A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”
The scenario description deliberately omitted any mention of race, ethnicity, or prejudice. Yet students who had been exposed to the anti-racist reading material were significantly more likely than those in the control group to interpret the actions of the admissions officer as prejudiced. They were also more likely to approve of punishing the admissions officer for this perceived bias.
Specifically, those in the test group were 21 percent more likely to perceive discrimination in the admissions process, 26 percent more likely to believe that the student had been harmed in some way, and 35 percent more likely to think that the admissions officer had committed a “microaggression”.
Moreover, the students in the test group also became more punitive. They were 12 percent more likely to support suspending the admissions officer for a semester, 16 percent more likely to demand a public apology from the officer, and (ironically) 12 percent more likely to support additional EDI training for the officer.
Perhaps the strangest finding from this part of the study was that there was not even a measurable change in attitudes towards persons of colour amongst those exposed to the anti-racist material. As the authors of the study write, the training “not only failed to positively enhance interracial attitudes, they provoked baseless suspicion and encouraged punitive attitudes”.
Lest one think that the students were exposed only to extreme material, primed for eliciting a strong reaction, the authors make clear that the training materials used in the study have featured in EDI programmes at Harvard, Columbia, the United Nations, and the American Psychological Association.
In another section of the study, undergraduates were exposed to two different sets of reading material about the Indian caste system. One set (for the control group) comprised academic works by internationally recognised scholars. The other set (for the test group) included “caste sensitivity training” from Equality Labs. Afterwards, both groups were asked to evaluate a scenario almost identical to example from the first experiment:
“Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in the Fall of 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”
As in the earlier example, those exposed to the EDI material were more likely to perceive harm (15.6 percent), microaggressions (32.5 percent), and bias in the process (11 percent), than those in the control group. Those in the test group also became more willing to punish the admissions officer, and actually became more prejudiced themselves, becoming 47.5 percent more likely to assess Hindus as generally racist.
This final point was further underlined when the study convenors presented the students with a series of modified quotes from Adolf Hitler, and asked whether they approved of them. The only modification made to the quotes was a substitution of the word “Jew” with “Brahmin”, one of the top Indian castes.
Those exposed to the “sensitivity training” were significantly more likely to agree with the demonising statements that Brahmins are “parasites” (35.4 percent increase), “viruses” (33.8 percent increase), and “the devil personified” (27.1 percent increase). What was that about microaggressions?
The authors end the study by emphasising five overall effects of EDI training: (1) heightened perceptions of oppressors and victims in all situations; (2) increased racial tension, causing participants to see discrimination without any evidence; (3) higher levels of “authoritarian policing tendencies, leading people to endorse surveillance and purity testing, strict social controls, and escalating responses from corrective to coercive”; (4) greater support for punitive punishments; (5) call for more training, creating a “self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and intolerance”.
Given recent reporting about the dire financial situation of most UK universities, these results should motivate educational leaders across the country to reconsider their EDI budgets. Queen Mary, University of London keeps a live page of all redundancies, restructuring programmes, and closures across the UK’s university sector, and it currently lists 85 institutions undertaking some form of austerity.
Yet most of these austerity drives take the form of redundancy programmes, voluntary severance schemes, and research grant cuts across academic departments. Money saved by cutting EDI programmes may not be enough to prevent large cuts in other parts of the universities, but it would be a good place to start.
Take as an example Coventry University, which has to make nearly £100 million in cuts over the next two years. The University told the BBC that it would have to make “difficult decisions”, and that every academic department would be hit. Despite this, Coventry does not appear to have any intention of cutting its EDI spending.
Talking to CAF, Provost and chair of Coventry’s EDI Council Professor Ian Dunn, said that although they were “reviewing all areas of expenditure”, there had “been no cuts to our EDI activities”. Indeed, he even emphasised that there currently “are no plans to look at the EDI spend”.
If Coventry really are looking into “difficult decisions” over the coming years, an easy decision might be cutting the EDI budget across the University. After all, if the NCRI study is any indication, EDI not only fails to make people more tolerant, but actually increases hostility and authoritarian tendencies. Surely, this is something our universities can do without.