WonkHE this week published a considered intervention on the “fragile future” of equality, diversity and inclusion by Arun Verma and Jason Arday, written in the shadow of the Trump-era turn against such programmes in US higher education – and the likelihood that those arguments will not remain neatly contained on the far side of the Atlantic.
The piece usefully warns against political interference in university autonomy, pointing to reports that some UK institutions receiving US funding have been asked to certify that none of it is being spent on EDI.
But its core rhetorical move – treating EDI as a singular, fixed and essentially unproblematic social good – is more questionable in a UK context. At one point, for instance, Verma and Arday write: “It is remarkable that there is resistance to helping create and sustain a more equitable, fair, dignified, respectful, socially just, and inclusive society.”
The difficulty is that the verb “to help” is doing a lot of rhetorical lifting. In practice, it can cover everything from straightforward legal compliance and good institutional housekeeping to far more prescriptive approaches to pedagogy, research, recruitment and promotion processes, some of which sit uneasily with England’s statutory free-speech regime under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA).
In the UK, there is virtually zero organised “resistance” to the basic legal floor. Public authorities, including universities, are required to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 – that is, to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and other prohibited conduct; advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not; and foster good relations between those groups.
But the PSED does not, of itself, impose any general requirement on higher education providers to restrict or regulate lawful speech, nor does it oblige them to adopt or promote any particular political or theoretical framework – whether critical race theory, settler colonial theory or decolonial scholarship – as the mandatory lens through which EDI questions must be understood.
Where pushback is growing concerns the tendency for EDI to expand the meaning of equality duties, with the narrow duty to have due regard under the PSED quietly inflated into a broader expectation of ideological conformity. That, in turn, clashes with academic freedom, since scholars will inevitably disagree about what “a more equitable, fair, dignified, respectful, socially just, and inclusive society” entails, and about what it means, in practice, to “help” bring it about.
Is this happening? All too often. The University of Leeds, for instance, recently introduced a sweeping “decolonising” programme intended to reshape curricula across taught provision. Documents seen by CAF show a framework of action plans, checklists and named staff leads, with departments required to demonstrate how they have applied prescribed principles across teaching, research and promotion.
An accompanying document, Decolonising Framework – Key Principles, states that decolonising “will be facilitated by schools and services and later reviewed through the inclusion of questions on decolonial practices in all university learning and teaching quality assurance mechanisms – including module and programme approval”. In other words, course approval appears to be tied to adherence to an explicitly ideological framework.
The same framework also contains critical race theory-inflected commitments to “develop intersectional, decolonial and racially literate research”. Alongside this sits an incentive structure: Leeds promises to “recognise and reward decolonial research and decolonial ‘work’ in our promotion and recognition schemes”. Those less persuaded are offered what Leeds calls an “enhanced programme of decolonisation training”, covering topics such as “anti-racist pedagogies and practice”, “Whiteness in the Academy” and “Allyship”.
In effect, a contested body of scholarship risks being elevated from one legitimate academic perspective among many into an institutional doctrine that staff are expected to affirm through curriculum design, research framing and career progression.
That is particularly difficult to square with the Office for Students’ free speech guidance, which cautions that “academic staff should not be constrained or pressured in their teaching to endorse or reject particular value judgements”, and warns elsewhere that staff should be “free to question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves at risk of being adversely affected by losing their jobs or privileges or reducing their likelihood of securing promotion or different jobs at the provider or constituent institution”.
Nor is Leeds an isolated case. CAF has seen similar patterns at other English universities, including Durham, Nottingham and King’s College London, where contested intellectual programmes are translated into bureaucratic EDI requirements in ways that risk conflicting with statutory free speech duties under HEFSA.
The question, then, is not whether universities should treat staff and students fairly or comply with equality law, but what “EDI” is being asked to do beyond that – and whether it is being used to import a programme that narrows the space for lawful disagreement and, in the long run, undermines the intellectual pluralism a university exists to protect.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in higher education across the Anglosphere. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.