The science minister, Patrick Vallance, is a distinguished scientist, fellow of the Royal Society, and former head of the department of medicine at UCL. He has described curiosity-driven research as the?¡°goose that lays the golden egg¡±, which must be protected if the UK is to continue to accrue economic benefits from science. It should come as no surprise, then, that he has announced a pause in Research England¡¯s plans for REF 2029 so that they can be subjected to proper scrutiny.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the mechanism by which about ?2 billion a year in research funding is allocated to academic institutions. Proposals to expand the scope of the REF to include ¡°people, culture and environment¡± (PCE), weighted at 25 per cent of an institution¡¯s score, would have weakened the link between research excellence and funding. PCE replaces the environment element in the 2021 REF, which defined environment in terms of ¡°supporting research and enabling impact¡± and was weighted at 15 per cent.

The PCE proposals were influenced by a suggesting that the concept of excellence is inherently biased and sustains ¡°epistemic injustice¡±. This rejection of the concept of excellence pulls the rug out from under universities¡¯ feet. Why should the government fund research, and why should the public support universities, if the funding is not used for excellent research?

The proposed transformation of the REF was not driven by ministerial priorities and has been criticised by vice-chancellors and grassroots academic organisations alike. So there will be widespread relief across the higher education sector that the science minister has intervened. It is likely that the PCE element will be reduced or replaced. But questions remain about the content of PCE and how it will be measured.

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Rather than taking a broad view of what aspects of research environment might be important, the proposals emphasised equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Criticising EDI sounds like criticising motherhood and apple pie. Steven Pinker has , ¡°I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire.¡±

My recently published government-commissioned report into ¡°¡± describes the way in which EDI roles and networks have promoted unlawful discrimination and harassment ¨C in direct opposition to what most people might assume EDI is for. By promoting highly contested theories ¨C including gender-identity theory: in a nutshell, the view that biological sex is not real or important ¨C EDI has impinged on academic freedom and fostered groupthink.

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Given the serious concerns about the partisan nature of some EDI initiatives, making research funding contingent on taking a particular approach to EDI poses serious risks to the impartiality of research and to public trust.

Universities have a duty both to uphold the 2010 Equality Act and to promote academic freedom. In England, the recently enacted ÌÇÐÄVlog (Freedom of Speech) Act (HEFSA) has focused minds on the importance of academic freedom. The University of Sussex has been fined ?585K by the Office for Students for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom. The OfS cited Sussex¡¯s ¡°Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement¡±, which was based on a template provided by Advance HE, the body?that provides EDI advice to universities.

A series of employment tribunal cases have found that universities have discriminated against gender-critical staff. And a has clarified that biological sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. Universities must focus on upholding their legal duties. If REF incentivises the legally dicey practices?that?have been widespread in EDI work, this will place universities in an impossible position.

The composition of?the REF 2029 People and Diversity Advisory does not allay the concern that doing so will stoke division and discrimination. One member has openly used??to refer to colleagues who hold legally protected gender-critical beliefs, and has??data collection on sex ¨C despite the fact that there is a legal requirement under the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) to collect diversity monitoring data on sex. Another wrote a??for a university web page that?appeared to attack JK Rowling for her gender-critical campaigning, stating ¡°From government interventions to infamous authors being the poster child for a regressive movement, it is a toxic and challenging landscape. Does this sound historically familiar?¡±. This is the kind of culture-wars posturing which damages the reputation of universities.

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Last year¡¯s REF initial decisions report generated widespread? to PCE, including a response from the London Universities¡¯ Council for Academic Freedom (LUCAF). LUCAF stated that the best measure of an effective research culture is the production of excellent research and proposed that UKRI should both lower the weighting of PCE element and include the active promotion of academic freedom as part of the assessment criteria for PCE.

In 2024, UKRI announced a consultation into the PCE indicators. The results were supposed to feed into the piloting of the exercise. One might expect a publicly funded research body to share the results of its?investigations in a timely way in order to inform discussion and decision making. Yet even the basic headline quantitative results have not been shared. It is therefore unclear how the decision to exclude academic freedom as a PCE indicator was informed.

In response to Freedom of Information requests, UK Research and Innovation has acknowledged that the company carrying out the PCE consultation delivered a report on 1 November 2024. But UKRI claims that publishing the report outside its (unspecified) schedule would not be in the public interest. UKRI also revealed that the report has been shared only with the Research England REF team, which administers the REF, and Research England chair Jessica Corner. It has not been shared with UKRI research council chairs or with ministers. ?

Clearly, the small group working on the REF have kept things very tight. This lack of transparency and meaningful consultation is not a good way to make decisions.

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The current pause provides grounds for optimism. Universities currently face extraordinary difficulties. The last thing they need is additional bureaucratic requirements which, however well intentioned, will inevitably detract from our core missions of education and research.

Alice Sullivan is professor of sociology and head of research at the UCL Social Research Institute.

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