Democratic processes using equity as a quality imperative and the covert continuation of banned diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures should form the basis of resistance to the onslaught of culture wars and threats to academic freedoms sweeping global higher education, a conference has heard.
Dr Jamil Salmi, a global tertiary education expert, told the event in Oxford that higher education was currently experiencing its fourth major attack on the principles of equality and equity in the past century, from authoritarian regimes and the anti-woke agenda.
The three previous assaults were in Nazi Germany, the United States under McCarthyism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Salmi, who is an emeritus professor of higher education policy at Diego Portales University in Chile and a research fellow at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education, told participants at the “Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education” event that there had been a “ferocious backlash” to 30 years of collaboration in improving access to higher education.
The event was hosted jointly by the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN), the Centre for Global Higher Education and the Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance.
He said that while there remained big disparities in participation and access across countries, many nations and organisations had tried to promote “the notion of the right to higher education and even the right to free higher education”.
“As we well know, the international community, meaning global UN and bilateral aid agencies and national governments, have worked together over the past 30 years to improve access and success in higher education, and many parts of the world have attained high participation rates,” Salmi said.
“But we know there are big disparities across countries, and Africa, South Asia and Central America are still behind compared to the rest of the world,” he noted.
‘Terrible memories’ of the past
The latest attack was in the form of anti-woke culture wars with three main targets: the exclusion of targeted groups, such as women and LGBTQ; the elimination of equity promotion programmes; and the banning of courses and books and indoctrination in fundamentalist views, which were “bringing back terrible memories” from the past.
“Perhaps the most glaring attack against participation is the wholesale exclusion of women from higher education in Afghanistan since 2021, but it is not only happening in fundamentalist Muslim governments,” Salmi said.
“Even among Christian fundamentalists we see a similar attitude.” He also cited the persecution of LGBTQ communities in countries like Poland and in some Republican states in the US.
Meanwhile, in countries such as Chile, Colombia, the Philippines and South Africa, subsidies that were available to poor students attending private universities “have been dismantled”, he said. The American government was also banning DEI programmes and even trying to prevent them from happening in other countries.
Salmi added: “The US government has recently been sending letters to universities throughout Europe, telling them that if they have DEI programmes, they would not be eligible anymore for research funding in partnership with a US university.
“Across the US we see the closing down of programmes [and] reallocation of resources to eliminate equity programmes that are described as being against the law.”
Resisting backlash
The backlash to strategies that promote equity, diversity and widening participation are a “setback” to those ideals and have led to a drop in institutional autonomy, resulting in attacks on academic freedom and a climate of fear and hostility, Salmi argued.
However, in countries “where you still have democratic processes intact, that’s the best way to push back”, he said. “In Poland, after eight years of attacks on the education system, the new government elected two years ago was able to reverse the negative measures.
“And in countries that have international legal commitments, that is also a way of trying to protect the equity agenda. Some US universities have tried to use proxies of race without actually using race, because this is banned by the Supreme Court [in admissions policies].
“So, for example, universities can focus on first-generation students on the assumption that many Black students could be helped in that way,” he noted.
Modes of resistance
But there were alternative modes of resistance, according to Salmi.
“You can change the name of the equity department, but you still carry on with the same programmes. However, perhaps the most powerful approach – and that’s what WAHEN is about – is to frame a strong body of evidence to resist the backlash against higher education equity,” he said.
“We have to recognise that despite the explicit goals of meritocracy, we still have a long way to go,” he added, highlighting that the proportion of first-generation students attending Oxford and Cambridge was still only about 18%, against a UK average of 48%.
“We see the same thing in the US, where the elite colleges and universities still have more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%, which can be contrasted with the great work done by the community colleges, where 39% of students are first-generation.”
Another way of confronting the backlash was to use quality assurance systems and to present equity as a quality imperative, thereby dismissing the notion that academic excellence works only if you are selective.
“There are many examples showing that you can have excellence with inclusion. For example, if you compare the proportion of low-income students at Berkeley with Harvard, it is about three times as high.
“There is a lot of evidence showing that diversity boosts critical thinking and academic performance, so equity needs to be in the core quality standards of our quality assurance systems.”
Bucking the trend
Professor Graeme Atherton, the director of WAHEN and associate pro vice-chancellor of the University of West London, who chaired the session, described Salmi’s presentation as “sobering”.
He told University World News: “While the challenges to equitable access and success across the world presented by populism are acute, there are many examples of universities and countries bucking this trend. Austria, Australia and Colombia are just three examples of countries where national and municipal authorities are investing energy in equity, focusing on inclusive values.
“It is vital that as the reductive anti-equity virus threatens to spread through higher education, we use WAHEN as a vaccine.
“By showing how equitable access benefits not just higher education but the whole of society and creating powerful networks of best practice, WAHEN can protect the most vulnerable students across the world from losing the transformative opportunities higher education provides,” he noted.
Originally written by Dorothy Lepkowska and published in University World News on 11 June 2025.