Funny kind of quality assurance
Over recent years the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) has updated their curriculum guidance in all subject areas to include themes of social justice. They have done this by requiring that all courses include elements of Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).
I didn’t know there was such a thing as the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, but now that I know, I’m baffled to learn that it “requires” political content in all subject areas. What, even physics, geology, astronomy, engineering, mathematics? What the flaming hell for?
One might well question how to incorporate the values of EDI into a course on abstract algebra or functional analysis. We are told it should be done by teaching that “some early ideas in statistics were motivated by their proposers’ support for eugenics, some astronomical data were collected on plantations by enslaved people, and, historically, some mathematicians have recorded racist or fascist views or connections to groups such as the Nazis.”
That’s insane. Stark raving mad. It’s also weirdly childish.
It is all but a tautology that promoting social justice is desirable. However, there is no consensus on what social justice actually is. The QAA talks glibly of “the values of EDI”, but EDI is one of the most contested topics in contemporary politics. There are fierce debates over such foundational topics as the definitions of racism, antisemitism and women.
About as foundational as it gets. If you don’t even know what women are you really need to go back to the basics until you have them down cold.
Fortunately, there is now a case-study one can consider to evaluate the effectiveness of the QAA’s recommendations. The module “Gateway to King’s” was piloted at King’s College London and was designed to introduce all first-year students at King’s to topics which map closely to the QAA’s required themes. The plan was to roll the module out as a compulsory module for all first-year students. However, the module was canned after the pilot. 1657 students were eligible to take the course, 366 enrolled and 42 completed it.
Let me guess – because it was more irritating than informative? Like, a LOT more?
Unsurprised. This is the same thing that’s happening over here with decolonizing the curricula. We just have different initialisms: DEI, SEL, and ESG.
The school where I taught was requiring sustainability in all disciplines. Some of the instructors actually incorporated it. Since none of them had a clue what was REALLY sustainable, and dismissed science as too reductive, the results were almost uniquely bad.
Meanwhile, the places where it might be useful – welding, automotive, construction – resisted incorporating it unless the standards of the industry required. No one enforced that. Fortunately, because the instructors who taught those courses had precious little idea about it, either.
Meanwhile, students were being encouraged to regard Environmental Science as just so much puffery, even though it was actually a hard sciences course where we never sang Kumbaya, held hands, or recited mantras. We talked only briefly about recycling, and spent quite a bit of time on hard science.
They had started encouraging DEI, but had not yet started requiring it. I suspect I retired just in time to miss that.
I’ll see if I can dig up a recent article I read, but it was about Alabama colleges closing their DEI programs. It noted that there was no improvement in the proportion of women in various areas of importance, despite the existence of these programs. I found it interesting that they mentioned the portion of women, rather than, say, the portion of Black people, but I am totally unsurprised that no benefits were found for these programs. These are checkboxes to allow schools to appear to be doing the Right Thing, without accomplishing much of anything.
ESD, by the way, is a World Economic Forum thing that has less to do with what one would intuitively think of as sustainability (i.e., having to do with environmental, ecological, and natural resource concerns) and more to do with repackaged Social Justice. Just as with the rest of Critical Social Justice, the strategy is to link everything back to Social Justice and thereby create a totalizing principle. These are the people who get excited by the idea, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Because no one’s tried to make that idea work before.
But trust them, guys! They’ve got the secret sauce to make it work this time!
Yeah, there should be definitions in place by which one can determine compliance and progress before calling for action. Effort without direction is aimless, pointless, and likely counterproductive.
Supply chains that extend across the globe make it much easier to hide environmentally and socially disastrous industrial practices. Where the drive to lower costs is in charge, things are going to go poorly for everyone involved, including the end user who gets a “bargain.” The trick is to die before the true price of your bargain catches up with you.
Learning to live more carefully on a fragile, limited planet shouldn’t be political or ideological, but it is. Powerful, vested interests don’t like the idea of “limits” at all. While it is true that on geological timescales the Earth has been survived natural disasters beyond what we could possibly do, but civilization doesn’t operate on recovery schedules that run to hundreds of thousands, or tens of millions of years. And the Earth that emerged was usually drastically different in terms of its constituent biotas. Again, not really words of comfort for our own predicament. We have a vested interest in keeping conditions much as they are, with an alarming disregard for consciously organizing our activities in order to do that. On this level, civilization doesn’t do “unprecedented” or “uncharted” very well. A certain degree of reliability and stability are required to keep humans alive, and those conditions are in turn reliant on the functioning of ecosystem services which we are degrading or destroying outright.
I can totally see the value of talking for a few minutes about discrimination of women in a theoretical physics course when you mention Emmy Noether or in computer science when you mention Grace Hopper or the famous NASA calculators (where it would be very interesting to explain how initially programming was considered a women’s job because it was thought to be basically just typing…)
I remember that when I studied physics in the 80s, one professor used part of his lecture time to talk about a conference of scientists engaging against the dangers of nuclear war. Most of the students thought this o.k., some were annoyed.
So telling people, where appropriate, about wider implications or the social context of a subject is, IMO, a good thing. But forcing it everywhere, even where it does not belong, seems counter-productive.