Despite U.K. universities grappling with financial challenges and cutting academic positions, budgets are still being allocated to create ‘woke’ roles in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) with salaries reaching up to £100,000. The Mail has more.
Nearly half of U.K. vice-chancellors expect their university to be in financial deficit this year following a drop in the number of lucrative international students and the impact of inflation on fees, running costs and pension contributions.
As a result, academic departments are being merged and courses closed down, with some campuses facing strike action in opposition to the plans. Yet as hundreds of jobs are being cut, the EDI workforce appears immune.
Aston University in Birmingham, where 60 academics in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences are at risk of redundancy, has filled a £98,000-a-year post in ‘People, Culture and Inclusion’.
At Oxford Brookes, mathematics and music programmes are being cut as part of a bid to save £2 million while seeking an ‘Anti-Harassment and EDI Adviser’ on £39,000.
The Open University has recorded a £25 million operating deficit and launched a voluntary severance scheme for associate lecturers, but it recently filled two EDI vacancies, both offering salary packages of up to £46,223. One is a project officer working mainly on “gender equality” who has to attend the office “at least twice a year”.
Restructuring at Portsmouth University is likely to lead to the loss of 47 jobs, but a head of EDI was recently hired on a salary of up to £76,462. And while “double-figure redundancies” of fixed-term contract staff have hit the History Department at University College London, it has launched a search for a senior-level ‘Director of Equality, Inclusion and Culture’ on an undisclosed salary.
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