Funding? Check your EDI policies
Rather than the merits of the research itself, it now matters more who is doing it
This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
In 1986, the UK government launched the Research Assessment Exercise to establish which universities produced the strongest research. In principle, such peer-review appraisal could be advantageous for the sector and informative for the public.
But theory is always pickpocketed by practice, and this periodic exercise has since grown into a chimera sapping the lifeblood from our greatest universities.
Every seven or eight years, UK Research and Innovation awards universities some £2 billion of taxpayer money for “Quality-related Research” allocated via the so-called “Research Excellence Framework” (REF).
For research-active universities, which greatly depend on this funding, the stakes of performing well are sky-high — and expensive: in 2021, this “exercise” cost some £420 million. Panicked preparations are now under way for the next “REF cycle” in 2029. Bizarrely, its evaluators have announced that they are less interested in research than ever before.
In 2014, 65 per cent of the REF evaluation concerned research; in 2021, 60 per cent. In 2029, only 45 per cent of the assessment will be based on the “contribution to knowledge and understanding” of research.
What, then, has the lion’s share of importance for “Research Excellence”? 25 per cent concerns “People, Culture and Environment”, up from 15 per cent in 2021: rather than the merits of the research work itself, it now matters more who is doing it, what values they espouse and what non-academic policies they follow.
Another 25 per cent concerns “Engagement and Impact”, i.e. how “research outputs” affect the public in measurable, quantifiable ways.
These changes aren’t idle: a report commissioned by UKRI had criticised the concept of “research excellence” as “ill-defined”, recommending instead the assessment of “indicators that support equality and diversity as a counterweight”.
Aspects to be scored include departments’ carbon emissions data, racial composition of staff, creation of safe spaces, implicit bias training and support of EDI “across all of its activities”.
Research is increasingly undertaken to guarantee EDI-approved public impact
Evidencing these new demands will require a huge growth in bureaucratic activity, the further bloat and cost of human resources, as well as a decrease in the productivity and integrity of researchers themselves. Worse still, research projects are now increasingly undertaken to guarantee EDI-approved, calculable public impact — so that money can be brought in to do whatever brought the money in.
Thankfully, some academics are saying enough is enough. Over 200 wrote to The Times this month expressing their concern that “these proposals pose serious risks to research integrity and quality, to academic freedom and to institutional autonomy and diversity”. They are right: the REF must be pared back severely or abandoned entirely.
Behind all this fundamental question looms: if governments — and taxpayers — are to pay, in part, for the research conducted in universities, what should they expect of it and whose judgment matters most?
Discussing this directly is difficult. But to cast an eye over the last nine centuries of English universities reveals one unshakeable truth: the greatest research breakthroughs have come not via governmental fiat, quango regulation or popular demand; they have come from individuals free to let their curiosity range deep and wide, without having to watch where they tread, look over their shoulder or take the knee.
