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The Radical Progressive University Guide

Dr Richard Norrie, January 2023

The Radical Progressive University Guide sets out to quantify the extent of ‘radical progressive’ policies at British Universities, including their curbs on free speech.

Dr Richard Norrie (director of the statistics and policy research programme) uses evidence from media reports and university websites to compile a new ‘radical progressive’ league table of Britain’s 140 universities based on a series of measures such as declared use of ‘trigger warnings’, the promotion of controversial concepts, such as ‘white privilege’, and requiring students to demonstrate they are ‘anti-racist’. These controversial concepts often have their roots in ‘Marxist’ ideology, according to Norrie.

The ‘Radical Progressive University Guide’ found that:

• 87 out of 140 universities had references to trigger warnings, or content warnings, or ‘content notes’ – 62 per cent.
• 79 out of 140 universities had mentions of ‘white privilege’ in guidance offered to staff and students or on their websites – 56 per cent.
• 82 out of 140 universities offered materials, training or resources on ‘anti-racism’ on their websites – 59 per cent.

Norrie finds that high tariff universities are more likely to be near the top of this league table than lower tariff institutions.

• 81 per cent of high tariff universities use trigger warnings, compared to just 46 per cent of low tariff ones.
• 74 per cent of high tariff universities endorse the concept of white privilege, compared to 48 per cent of low tariff.
• 74 per cent of high tariff universities offer anti-racism training, compared to 41 per cent of low tariff universities.

Norrie criticises universities for ‘decrying colonialism’ while taking money from China, a country he describes as ‘mired in modern colonial controversy and accusations of genocide’. He accuses Britain’s top universities of a ‘new moralism that reeks of hypocrisy’.

He concludes that ‘Universities have adopted, wholesale, a mutation and splicing of past radicalisms that include Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, Freudianism, and Maoism, fomented largely through public subsidies.’