The accusations of critics that “woke waste” public research funding is “ideologically biased” should not be dismissed by universities as background noise, experts have warned.

One such critic is Charlotte Gill, a self-styled independent journalist with almost 100,000 followers on . Since 2024, Gill has been publishing “investigations” that involve trawling lists of UK government-funded research projects and highlighting titles and abstracts she deems “woke waste”.

Recent articles published on her include “£1.86 million: The taxpayer-funded research of ‘Pregnant Men’” and “‘Queer Fish’ researcher also received £120,080 from the taxpayer-funded AHRC”.

Gill told ߣߣ��Ƶ that her efforts to find out where, in her view, public money is being wasted is “really important for academia. We’re studying a lot of nonsense and it’s very ideological. It feels as if you have to show a left-wing bias to get funding, and the whole system feels skewed that way.”

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Before Gill became a freelance journalist in 2023, publishing articles for The Daily Telegraph and other national newspapers, she was a producer for controversial broadcaster GB News. On her Substack, she pledges her support for a US-style Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) in the UK. In the US, thousands of research grants have been over the past two years, many of them as a result of by DoGE.

Some of Gill’s criticism has been directed at the Economic and Social Research Council. Rather than dismissing such critiques outright, the body’s executive chair, Stian Westlake, said that sometimes “critique from outside a field, including from laypeople, can identify issues that are overlooked by specialists”. Nevertheless, he noted that “non-expert critique of academic projects can sometimes be off-base”.

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For instance, a taxpayer-funded project on the Medieval English grain trade was recently criticised – not by Gill – for being “arcane”, but the report actually asked “seemingly obscure questions” crucial to a central question of how economic growth happens, according to Westlake. The current UK government’s central goal is to boost sluggish economic growth.

Across the ESRC’s funding, “what matters is that…we are being rigorous in the projects we fund, supporting truth-seeking and useful knowledge, and avoiding systematic bias and groupthink,” Westlake said.

In the face of scrutiny like Gill’s, “I’d say that the best thing for the research system – the research councils, the government, researchers, universities – is to be open about what we do and to engage with criticism,” wherever it comes from, he said.

Diana Beech, director of the Finsbury Institute at City St George’s, University of London, shares Westlake’s view. “Universities are major recipients of taxpayer funding and cannot simply dismiss concerns about research priorities out of hand as ideological attacks,” she told THE.

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Despite many academics having moved away from X, Beech said the “arguments aired there continue to shape public discourse, particularly as politicians become more willing to question universities and the value of certain disciplines”.

Beech warned that the “real risk for universities is losing control of the narrative”. To combat this, in financially difficult times, Beech said they need to “become much better at demonstrating the public value of research, especially where it addresses contested social issues”.

Huw Davies, lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, agreed that social media critiques of research “should not be dismissed as background noise”. But “any criticism alleging waste or a lack of rigour should be directed towards the relevant funding institutions through established and transparent procedures, rather than circulated as rage bait on X.”

Academics whose work is held up for ridicule online “can receive unsettling, aggressive or even threatening emails from anonymous members of the public simply for carrying out their work in good faith”, he said. And he questioned the rigour of Gill’s investigations, suggesting that such critiques made “no effort to understand the field-specific technical language that may appear esoteric to non-specialists”.

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Gill, who has an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Leeds, said she was “more familiar with some of the language and methods being used than perhaps these academics realise…And I still think it’s nonsense.”

But Davies insisted that a Gill-style critique “helps no one – except those profiting from circulating rage bait on X, YouTube and Substack within the new transatlantic political economy of hate”.

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frances.jones@timeshighereducation.com