Research: another casualty of woke

Take UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the super-corporation that brings together the university research councils. It boasts 7,000 employees, a wage bill of nearly half-a-billion, and distributes some £8 billion of taxpayers’ money (roughly £120 for every man, woman and child in the UK) for research every year.

This month, UKRI produced a new draft equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. This is worth some close scrutiny.

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There is an overt commitment to ‘treating people equitably to achieve equality in outcomes’ and to ‘reshaping the system’ so as to create ‘welcoming and equitable structures’. Other aims include making every employee ‘inclusive in all that they do’; ‘addressing under-representation’ on racial lines; producing a research system ‘by everyone, for everyone’ (whatever that means); and doing all this with a ‘representative and diverse workforce’ (ie, quotas by another name).

This new strategy applies not only to UKRI itself. If you want any money from it, you’d better toe the line, too. It wants UKRI-supported research to be ‘delivered in inclusive ways to create more equitable outcomes and benefits’, and wants to ‘use levers’ to ‘make change’ (work that out for yourself).

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This is not only misguided but very worrying. For one thing, radical social activism of the kind discreetly promoted here is all very well with politicians and, let us add, with professors. It is not alright in a non-political organisation set up to distribute government largesse in an even-handed manner to those it thinks will use it most efficiently. We do not expect bodies of this kind to boast of their contacts with political ‘advocacy groups’ and ‘grassroots movements’, or to be ‘championing and focusing on systemic and structural change’.