This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Academia in chains
Your important article on the dilution of objective merit criteria in assessing university research projects in favour of how highly they score in delivering equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as the basis for receiving government funds focuses on how this distortion will shape the 2029 Research Excellence Framework [UNIVERSITY CHALLENGED, JUNE].
Sadly, universities do not have to wait until then to see how EDI requirements are subverting detached empiricism.
If you Google “university EDI statement”, you’ll be deluged with British universities’ initiatives setting out the measures they have implemented to put EDI criteria at the heart of every aspect of scholarship. The assumptions that previously underpinned being an “equal opportunities employer” are old hat.
Merely not discriminating is insufficient. The focus is now on ensuring EDI outcomes (not opportunities) on race, gender and other protected characteristics as a guide to suitability for an academic post.
The impetus has come from the 2010 Equality Act and its Public Sector Equality Duty which created legal requirements for public bodies to address these areas.
EDI enthusiasts, now embedded across university administration and departments, are employed to ensure compliance. Under this cover, they push beyond what the law requires.
This has led various universities — including Cambridge — to issue “guidance” that limits appointment panels to those who have “completed the online University modules on E&D [equality and diversity] and Understanding Unconscious Bias”.
What’s more, if panels fail to find a sufficiently diverse range of applicants then they are encouraged to appoint nobody (even if there were suitable candidates for the post) until they’ve reopened/widened the search criteria.
Elsewhere there have been cases where applicants for lectureships and research appointments were required to submit evidence of what they have done to promote EDI. When this is the requirement, what applicant dares respond “I’ve not got involved in Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index because my focus on particle physics has been all-consuming”?
Try offering objective criticism of this process from within the university — and see what it does to your career prospects.
A current university lecturer
[Name and address supplied]
Connoisseurs or publicists?
Rufus Bird [ART HOUSE, JUNE] raises a perceptive point about whether connoisseurship is still a prime determinant in the choice of works hanging in public galleries. Today we are encouraged to explore the diverse approaches and expressive intent over a purely scholarly, art historical interpretation.
Mr Bird welcomes the survival of connoisseurship in recent purchases of two sixteenth-century works by the Getty Museum and London’s National Gallery because appreciating such work requires “deep knowledge of art history”.
So far, so old school. But what is the role of the connoisseur — who may be alternatively styled “expert” or “taste maker” — in contemporary art? Here fashion, buzz and public relations combine to shape a “what’s hot and what’s not” approach that permeates galleries and international auction houses alike.
What does it say about contemporary art (or, if you prefer, about me) that I trust the opinions of connoisseurship about works pre-dating 1990 but couldn’t tell a connoisseur from a publicist on art since then?
Giles Burnett
Bangkok, Thailand
Boothby’s Finest Hour
In an otherwise perfectly fair and reasonable denunciation of Bob Boothby [PROFILE: LORD BOOTHBY, JUNE], Alexander Larman leaves out one vital fact.
By stating that, “as a politician, Boothby was negligible” as he “achieved little of note as a backbench MP”, Larman ignores the glorious and untarnishable service he did his country in one of its darkest hours.
For Boothby was one of the 41 National Government supporters who bravely voted with the Opposition to bring down Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate on 8 May 1940 and thus make Winston Churchill prime minister during the Second World War.
For that transcendental act of political courage and foresight, much of what Larman correctly describes as Boothby’s “personal dishonesty and sexual peccadilloes” should be forgiven him.
Andrew Roberts
House of Lords
