Taxpayer funds Phd in ‘how gardens can cultivate queer anti-racist communities’

The taxpayer is spending at least £1 million a year on postgraduate courses such as the “garden as a site to cultivate queer anti-racist communities” and “spiritual activism”.

Techne, a consortium of nine universities in London and the South East, awards 57 doctoral studentships annually, all of which are sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a subsidiary of the taxpayer-funded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

One student exploring “the garden” suggests that “interaction with plants - contrasting lived experience and practices by people of colour with received exclusionary Western approaches to engaging with ecology – allows for histories of suppression and marginalisation to come to the fore.”

The research involves “developing an actual garden” in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, and monitoring “the active participation of diverse stakeholders … invested in the site”.

‘Racializing assemblages’

Other studentships are in “poetic responses to climate grief under patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony” and “biopolitics of Right-wing populism: the people, the population and racializing assemblages”. Techne universities include the University of Brighton, the University of Westminster and Kingston University.

UKRI is sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and was given a budget of £8.9 billion for 2024-25.

Techne’s doctoral studentships cover tuition fees and a stipend of approximately £18,622 a year. With 57 studentships awarded in 2023, the costs are likely to be at least £1 million for that year. The scheme has been running since 2016.

Matt Goodwin, an author and Professor of Politics, told The Telegraph “This is what happens when universities lean strongly to the Left.

“For every eight professors who identify on the centre or radical left, there’s now only one conservative professor. So we have a very strong ideological imbalance on campus and that’s reflected in the research that is being funded partly by the taxpayer.

“What we need to do is to get back to genuine ideological diversity on campus, and have a much greater range of both academics and students joining higher education, so we can begin to fix this glaring imbalance.”

Rupert Lowe, Reform UK business spokesman, said: “Taxpayer money needs to be treated with far more respect. We’re all paying more and more tax, and an increasing amount of it is wasted on tripe like this.

“When the country is literally crumbling apart, this is a spit in the face of decent men and women working hard and paying their taxes. Any civil servant pushing this nonsense should be out of a job by the end of the month - let’s start setting some standards when it comes to public money.”

‘Hard-working taxpayers’

Jane Stevenson, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton North East, said “I’m a proud grammar school girl who does value learning for learning’s sake.

“I want to back research and academia, but I would have trouble convincing the hard-working taxpayers of Wolverhampton North East that money taken from their wages to fund these projects is being well-spent.”

A UKRI spokesperson said: “UKRI invests in a diverse research and innovation portfolio. This includes awarding block grants to Higher Education Institutions to support PhD studentships.

“The institutions make decisions and allocate the funding to specific studentship proposals, following an application process.”

Techne was approached for comment.