This year has been a pretty turbulent one for higher education. In the USA, it feels like every week there is another attack on higher education and on anything related to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI in the UK – I’m not sure why it seems to be DEI in the US). It has to be said a depressing number of institutions and professional societies have demonstrated a complete lack of backbone in not only immediately complying with orders from the Trump administration, but going even further than has been suggested. Grim times indeed.

However there also seem to be increasing numbers of articles questioning any attempts to create more inclusive higher education in the UK as well. One from earlier in the year has stuck in my mind – a piece from the Daily Mail called ‘Universities queering courses to be more welcoming to transgender and non binary students’. I wanted to unpack it a bit as an example of why we need to be much more confident in making the case for inclusive curricula. This article happens to focus on LGBTQIA+ inclusion, but my arguments are as relevant to any demographic group.

“A number of Russell Group institutions are trying to embed ‘queer perspectives’ into courses, a Daily Mail audit shows.”

Firstly – to be fair, the piece is perhaps more balanced than you would expect. It is mostly factual, giving examples from a number of institutions of where LGBTQIA+ perspectives and theories have been introduced into curricula. There has clearly been either a freedom of information request or an equivalent attempt to assess whether courses are introducing this content. The article doesn’t actually state that this is a bad thing, but it is implied throughout that this is a negative trend. A quick scan of the comments indicates that the vast majority of readers have interpreted the piece as negative, and that ‘queering the curriculum’ is detrimental to the standard of education offered.

Inclusive curricula are intellectually rigorous curricula

So let’s challenge that directly. Accusations of ‘going woke’ are usually coupled with assumptions around ‘dumbing down’. University provides higher education. It is a place where nuance and complexity should be discussed. Curricula that incorporate a variety of perspectives are more intellectually rigorous, not less. I have never heard a coherent intellectual argument for only presenting the dominant cultural perspective. University education should be about exploring nuance and controversy, which cannot be done without considering diverse viewpoints, examples and theories.

In this case, the attack is clearly underpinned by overly simplistic assumptions around the binary nature of biological sex. As a biologist, this really concerns me. Overly simplistic ‘scientific truths’ have been used as a tool of oppression, discrimination and violence for as long as there has been science. We have seen it with race. We have seen it with disability. We have seen it with sexual orientation. We are now seeing it with sex and gender. Science is never as clear cut as those with oppressive ideologies would have you believe. As scientists we have a moral duty to stand up against the misuse of science to restrict the human rights of others.

In the particular case of sex and gender, the ‘I learned about XX and XY at school and therefore cannot imagine anything else’ argument is particularly strong right now. What you learned at school in any subject is inevitably somewhat simplified and frankly out of date compared to current research and knowledge. Any professional biologist will tell you that nature laughs in the face of simplicity, as there is always a variant that disproves any ‘biological truth’.

I’ll put my hands up here. I’m one of those ‘woke’ academics who covers the genetics of sex determination, and discusses multiple mechanisms through which an individual’s karyotype (chromosomes) may not match their externally presenting phenotype. Am I going woke for exploring the role that CYP21A2 mutations have in the enzymatic action of steroid 21-hydroxylase in congenital adrenal hyperplasia? I wouldn’t usually use such technical language in this blog, but does that sound like dumbing down to you? And that’s not even getting into the ‘queerness’ of sex determination in non-human organisms. Am I ‘queering the curriculum’ for discussing the hermaphroditic nature of plants, which literally have both male and female reproductive parts in the same flower?

Inclusive curricula allow marginalised students to feel they are safe and that they belong

If I am queering the curriculum to make transgender and non-binary students feel welcome, isn’t that a good thing? 7% of UK university applicants declare an LGBTQIA+ identity to UCAS when they apply to university. This is 2.5 times higher than for the general population. This figure will underestimate the proportion of LGBTQIA+ students. Many will choose not to declare this information to UCAS when they apply to university. More will come to this identity during their studies, and I doubt that any students would see updating the university student record as an important part of their coming out experience. It is therefore likely that around 10% of students have an LGBTQIA+ identity. On a purely pragmatic basis, these students pay the same tuition fee as their straight peers, and are just as entitled to have a curriculum that ‘speaks’ to them.

Including these examples in the curriculum really matters to individuals. I’ve seen multiple students come forward and seek support from staff after these topics are included. Students who were scared to be themselves. Struggling with their mental health thinking they were the only person ‘like them’. Or genuinely unsafe in their own communities, but felt safe for the first time because a lecturer included an example that they identified with. Students who might otherwise have felt alienated, or that they didn’t belong. In my experience, being more inclusive in an authentic way for your academic discipline is a mechanism to stimulate important conversations about belonging, identity and representation. This matters, and in a small number of cases is literally life changing (and even life saving) for our students.

We must defend inclusive curricula as the intellectually and ethically right thing to do

When the right wing attack ‘woke’ curricula, what they are really attacking inclusive curricula. As a colleague of mine says, if you are not prepared to be inclusive, who are you choosing to exclude? If just one student has seen an alternative brighter future for themselves as a result of my attempts to be more inclusive, then that is worth far more than any attack I might face. Here I have used the lens of LGBTQIA+ inclusion, but the same arguments are relevant for any attempt to diversify or decolonise the curriculum.

As far as I am concerned, adopting an inclusive curriculum is the intellectually and ethically right thing to do. If you agree with me, I hope you will join me in defending inclusive curricula far more robustly and loudly. In the current political climate, our students and society need this more than ever.

References

What is the experience of LGBT+ students in education. UCAS report, 2021

https://www.genderinclusivebiology.com/newsletter/poster-beyond-xx-and-xy