The growing schism between UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Westminster government over equality issues, highlighted by Michelle Donelan’s explosive letter about Israel, could cause major damage to UK science unless an understanding on research culture is reached, universities have been warned.
While the science secretary’s controversial letter to UKRI demanding the closure of an equality committee centred on what she called “the sharing of extremist views on social media” by panel members who “expressed sympathy” for Hamas, it also drew attention to “wider questions of UKRI’s approach to equality, diversity and inclusion”, arguing that it was adding “burden and bureaucracy to funding requirements”.
This is understood to refer to plans led by Research England to overhaul the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) by reducing the importance of outputs from 60 per cent to below 50 per cent while increasing the weighting of research culture in assessment to 25 per cent.
Those reforms have attracted criticism from some university leaders for their lack of precision, with UKRI widening its consultation after reporting that “informal discussions with the sector have identified the need for clearly defined indicators” on which culture will be assessed.
