Universities are sleepwalking into censorship
by Arif Ahmed, spiked:
Higher-education charities are rewarding those who adopt the most censorious policies.
History hardly lacks examples of unintended consequences, but Hanoi 1902 remains especially instructive. Having caused a rat infestation by laying nine miles of sewage pipes, the colonial government of French Indochina reckoned it could fix things by paying locals to catch them: one cent per tail handed in at the local municipal office. The scheme began in April and by June the Vietnamese were producing up to 20,000 tails per day.
And yet the rat population seemed only to increase – to the point where bubonic plague returned to the city. Why? Instead of killing rats, hunters simply docked their tails and set them free to breed more rats. There were even reports of rat farms popping up just outside the city.
This provides a perfect illustration of how well-intentioned incentives can misfire. When you reward people for certain outcomes, they will pursue them by methods that you never foresaw, and with side effects that you never intended.
Something very similar has happened in the UK’s higher-education sector. Advance HE, a charity established in 2018 from a merger of the Equality Challenge Unit, the Higher Education Academy and Leadership for Higher Education, currently offers two incentive schemes to British universities: the Race Equality Charter and the Athena SWAN Charter. Universities apply for ‘Bronze’, ‘Silver’ and (for Athena SWAN) ‘Gold’ awards that demonstrate their commitment to race and gender equality. To apply, institutions have to subscribe to Advance HE and submit, among other things, an ‘action plan’ for change. If an institution wins, it can get a shiny badge that it can advertise to potential students, employees and funding bodies.
Racism, sexism and other prejudices do exist, of course. And some institutions are taking serious steps to address them – for instance, by introducing blind application processes for some posts, as at the University of Birmingham. But all too often these ‘action plans’ are effectively blueprints for corporate virtue-signalling, censorship and indoctrination.
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