The UK university sector won’t solve it’s financial problems by prioritising diversity goals over research quality, says Paul Ormerod

The university sector in the UK often seems to live in a dream world.

Research England, for example, is proposing to order them to “robustly” promote diversity and inclusion in order to qualify for access to £2bn of taxpayers’ money available to them for research.

The plans have apparently been drawn up with the universities themselves.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) will account for 25 per cent of the weight in the assessment of the submissions which universities make for the cash. Incredibly, their research output itself is downgraded to only 50 per cent of the weight.

To be fair, around 200 academics, most of whom have genuinely prestigious research pedigrees, have objected in no uncertain terms.

This is against a background of serious financial difficulty for the university sector. More than 50........

© City A.M.