A CAF investigation has revealed the existence of a compulsory “EDI Awareness Module” for all first-year students of Cardiff University. In the online course, students take a quiz to reveal how “privileged” they are, learn about “microaggressions”, and are taught to use properly “inclusive language”.
Starting university can often be a stressful experience. You typically have to learn entirely new subjects, make new friends, and navigate a new, complex social setting with your peers.
However, if you are at Cardiff, these difficulties may be alleviated by what the University calls “a fantastic opportunity to enhance your awareness” of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. CAF has seen details of this course, which confirms that “all first-year Undergraduate Students must complete the EDI Awareness Module [emphases in the original]”.
First off, students are given a quiz to “explore [their] experiences of privilege and marginalisation” and to answer that burning question: “How privileged are you?”. They are given 9 simple statements, which they must rate as either true or false. Examples include “I rarely feel hyper-vigilant or anxious when I walk alone” and “I feel the media usually portrays my identity in a positive light”.
Once the quiz is complete, students are presented with a pie-chart representing their level of privilege. They then move on to a section on “microaggressions”. Examples include “Everyone can succeed if you just work hard enough”, “All lives matter”, calling someone articulate, and complementing someone on their English.
As well as microaggressions, students are also taught about “Micro-Insults”, “Micro-Invalidation”, and even “Micro-Assaults”. The last of these apparently denotes “deliberate insults that have the intention of hurting someone”, such as “calling someone names”, “holding your belongings close to you when around certain groups of people”, or “posting offensive content online”.
These are different from the “Micro-insults”, which are “subtle but insensitive comments”, including remarks like “You don’t look like someone who would be interested in…” or “Men don’t usually understand this sort of thing…”.
In a final section on “inclusive language”, participants are taught the rules of EDI Newspeak. Apparently, many English idioms are “based in ableism” such as “the blind leading the blind”. Colloquial phrases are also to be avoided, including “Kill two birds with one stone”, “piece of cake”, or “break a leg”. According to the module, these phrases are examples of “very British English, and would not translate well”. So, when speaking English at a British university, students ought to consider how their phrases might translate into other languages in order to ease understanding for those who may not be native speakers of “British English” – a classic case of what has been called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
The course then moves into what seems an attempt to start a civil war within the left-wing language police. Students are instructed not to use acronyms like BAME and BME because these “can exclude people who do not have specialist knowledge”.
As the examples roll on, participants in the module are also cautioned against derogatory terms like “crazy” and to avoid assumptions as much as possible, including that “everyone has biological parents”. While it is true that not everyone knows their biological parents, it seems a fair assumption that everyone has biological parents.
Most of these examples are just silly and the sort of thing one has come to expect from EDI departments in higher education. However, as completion of the module is mandatory for first-year students, it helps set the tone for the environment on campus.
These restrictions on everyday speech prime new undergraduates to be extremely careful in what they say, to whom they say it, and exactly how they phrase it. If the first course you do at university teaches you that the phrase “piece of cake” is problematic, you might think twice before offering up a controversial opinion in your next seminar.
Students should be taught to value intellectual discussion and a diversity of viewpoints, not to police language in themselves and their peers. We call on Cardiff University to scrap compulsory modules like this and instead encourage their students to think and speak freely. In the meantime, we say break a leg to all the students who have to take this crazy course – it will certainly not be a piece of cake.