Universities Told to Drop DEI Rules for Staff Under New Government Guidance

Universities have been told to scrap rules that push the DEI agenda under new Government guidance issued by the Office for Students to ensure free speech is protected on campus. The Telegraph has the story.

The guidance instructs universities to scrap policies controversially used to enforce what critics have branded “ideological conformity”.

This is to ensure they do not breach the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which is set to come into law in August after being proposed under the Tories.

Guidance states that to avoid falling foul of the Act, people should not be compelled to sign up to university codes of conduct that insist on promoting ‘social justice’ or other political values.

The University of Newcastle code of conduct states that it will maintain a “longstanding commitment… to social justice” and a belief that universities should “play a fundamental role in creating and fostering societies that are more equitable”.

New guidance warns that commitments such as these could stifle free speech as dissenting from what is defined as ‘social justice’ could be prohibited.

The Office for Students guide, overseen by free speech advocate Arif Ahmed, also advises scrapping other ways of compelling conformity that have proven controversial in the past.

It states that academics should not be required to prove their “commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion”.

Many job applications in academia contain an inclusion statement, which incites applicants to state how they could support diversity and inclusion on campus.

Earlier this year, the campaign group Alumni for Free Speech claimed that universities including Oxford routinely demanded that job applicants support diversity measures.

New guidance states that academics being urged to profess a commitment to certain “values, beliefs or ideas”, in order to secure a job, could stifle any expression of dissent from these ideas.

Worth reading in full.