Bye bye, EDI?

King’s College London (KCL) has scrapped a requirement for job applicants to submit a “diversity statement” following pressure from academic freedom campaigners, in one of the first signs that the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which came fully into force in England on 1st August, is beginning to bite.

The job listing, posted on 12th August for a lectureship in music history at the prestigious Russell Group institution, originally asked candidates not only for a CV and covering letter but also for “a separate document… describing their past/current experience of supporting student welfare and equality, diversity and inclusion in the higher education context”. By the following week that requirement had vanished, marking a quiet climbdown and a win for academic freedom. 

KCL is hardly unique. Large public university systems in the United States began adopting these requirements during the 2010s. By 2019, every campus in the University of California system had implemented mandatory EDI statements for faculty applicants, with some committees even using them as a first-round filter to cut down the applicant pool before reviewing academic qualifications.

While a second Trump presidency has dampened enthusiasm in the US, the trend is still gathering pace in the UK. A recent investigation by Alumni for Free Speech (AFFS) found that at least eight Russell Group universities explicitly required applicants to show evidence of support for EDI, in some cases making it an “essential” criterion. At the University of Leeds, for example, candidates “can only be shortlisted if they provide sufficient evidence of working to promote equality, diversity and inclusion”.

AFFS also identified job descriptions at eleven universities that required new academic staff to “promote”, “support”, or “commit to” EDI policies as a condition of employment. In other words, loyalty tests were written into the job description. Nor is this just an elite problem. Beyond the Russell Group, AFFS uncovered similar provisions at nearly half of 108 English and Welsh universities.

While “equality”, “diversity” and “inclusion” sound uncontroversial, in practice they often embody contested ideological commitments. Universities rarely spell out exactly what they expect in a diversity statement, but their policies and training give a clear signal. Initiatives such as “liberating the curriculum” at the Open University and UCL, unconscious-bias training, or drives for “citational justice” all suggest that applicants are expected to affirm tenets of critical race theory, whether by pledging to ‘decolonise’ syllabuses, embed anti-racism into teaching, or reframe research practices.

Policies on gender identity are equally uncompromising, demanding affirmation of deeply contested theory. The University of Sussex’s trans and non-binary equality policy mandated that course materials “positively represent trans people and trans lives” and treated “transphobic abuse, harassment or bullying” as disciplinary offences. According to a recent investigation by the higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS) — which earlier this year fined Sussex a record £585,000 — provisions of this kind could chill lawful speech and disproportionately target gender-critical views. In 2024, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) also revealed that at least nine UK universities now define “transphobia” as denying or refusing to accept a trans person’s gender identity.

For any prospective applicant scrolling a university website, it doesn’t take a doctorate in discourse analysis to decode the message: what’s expected is not respect for some vague notion of “diversity” or “inclusion”, but fealty to a very specific and highly controversial set of beliefs.

The problem is that when mandatory EDI statements mirror these institutional expectations, they risk colliding with the Equality Act 2010, which protects individuals from discrimination on the grounds of protected characteristics, including philosophical belief. Recent legal rulings confirm that certain viewpoints such as gender-critical beliefs about sex and gender, or “colour-blind” opposition to critical race theory, qualify for protection. Forcing a scholar to profess allegiance to an EDI policy that contradicts those beliefs could amount to indirect discrimination.

KCL shows the problem in microcosm. In 2024, barrister and human rights expert Akua Reindorf KC issued a legal opinion on the university’s promotion policy, which required academics to demonstrate their “support” for its EDI ambitions. She described the policy as “partisan and ideological in nature”, criticised its reliance on Stonewall-style training materials that contained “numerous incorrect or misleading assertions” about equality law, and warned that requiring allegiance to contested gender-identity theory placed gender-critical staff at a distinct disadvantage.

In 2025, AFFS’s report, University recruitment: EDI requirements causing free speech compliance failures, named KCL one of the “most egregious offenders”, noting that the institution had previously been warned about such practices and had “done nothing”. CAF has also since heard from academics about job interviews at the institution where they were asked: “What approach would you take to promote EDI?”

Yet the Reindorf opinion, along with repeated warnings from campaign groups about the misapplication of equality law, did not bring meaningful change. What appears different now is the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which requires universities to take “reasonably practicable steps” to protect lawful speech, adopt codes of practice on free expression, and actively promote academic freedom.

Mandatory EDI declarations are now likely to breach universities’ duties under the new regime

The Act also gives the OfS real regulatory muscle. It can already investigate and fine universities that fail to protect free speech — as Sussex recently discovered to its cost — and a new complaints scheme for staff and visiting speakers will soon allow individuals to trigger investigations directly. That matters because although universities have technically been under a statutory duty to protect free speech since the 1980s, section 43 of the Education Act 1986 was narrow in scope and had no enforcement mechanism, short of expensive judicial review, leaving it effectively toothless. 

Against this backdrop, mandatory EDI declarations are now likely to breach universities’ duties under the new regime. The OfS’s regulatory guidance is explicit: universities must “not require applicants to any academic position to commit (or give evidence of commitment) to a particular viewpoint”. One worked example in that guidance (Example 32) addresses the practice of “requiring a commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion”. Although framed around promotion, the regulator makes clear the same principle applies to appointments. In such circumstances, it advises, “removing this requirement is … likely to be a reasonably practicable step” to fulfil the duty to protect free speech.

That clarity may explain why KCL dropped the requirement so quickly. For the first time, universities face not only public criticism, but regulatory sanction if they persist. The quiet reversal at King’s is therefore not just a response to campaigner pressure, but evidence that the new free speech law is already altering university behaviour.