In higher education, few concepts have accelerated and expanded as dramatically as inclusion.
What began as a tightly defined commitment to enabling students with disabilities to participate on equitable terms has evolved into something far broader, more ambitious, and increasingly vague.
It is now treated as a moral imperative, a performance metric, a strategic direction, a pedagogic philosophy, and an institutional identity.
Inclusion is invoked with confidence and urgency, yet rarely interrogated with the precision that universities would normally demand from ideas that shape policy, resource allocation, and everyday academic work.
As a result, it’s become a shifting and unfocused ideal whose ever-expanding theoretical basis risks rendering its practical implementation unmanageable and, at times, incoherent.
Not a rejection
This isn’t a rejection of inclusion – it’s an attempt to address what inclusion is becoming. An umbrella concept that absorbs disparate agendas, a rhetorical device that legitimises policy, and a shield that obscures the widening gap between educational aspirations and the realities of institutional capacity.
It’s essential to recognise that inclusion expanded for understandable reasons – entrenched inequalities in recruitment, attainment, belonging, and graduate outcomes demonstrated that earlier, narrower models left many students structurally disadvantaged.
These concerns were real, and they demanded more than minimal compliance. But as the concept expands without restraint, the very idea of what’s “reasonable” becomes stretched to the point where clarity dissolves and feasibility collapses.
Where it started
Historically, inclusion in higher education centred on the notion of reasonable adjustments, grounded in law and shaped by considerations of necessity, proportionality, and practicality. These provided targeted interventions – lecture capture, extended deadlines, accessible buildings – designed around identifiable needs. The principle was pragmatic, bounded, and tangible.
Over time, though, inclusion has been recast in ways that go far beyond these original commitments. Increasingly, it’s treated as a universal promise – a guarantee that every student, regardless of background, preference, psychological disposition, or socio-cultural identity, will experience higher education without encountering barriers, discomfort, or inequity.
In practice, this shift is visible in policies that extend far beyond disability – the blanket introduction of “inclusive assessment” models that limit exams, require universal flexible deadlines, or favour coursework-only structures, often justified on the grounds that they reduce inequity rather than because they support specific pedagogic goals.
This evolution has transformed a rights-based approach into something closer to an all-purpose institutional obligation, where every expression of challenge or dissatisfaction risks being reframed as evidence that inclusion has failed, and every failure becomes justification for further expansion. That trajectory produces an impossible mandate that no institution can fully satisfy.
Mission creep
The inflation of inclusion has taken several forms. As the term has broadened, it’s become synonymous with maximal institutional responsiveness, and ordinary aspects of learning – moments of uncertainty, academic struggle, or cultural unfamiliarity – are increasingly interpreted as problems requiring institutional intervention rather than as inherent features of intellectual development.
Some departments now pre-emptively remove or sanitise challenging materials – texts dealing with violence, empire, or identity – because they fear that student discomfort may be framed as exclusionary or unsafe. Staff report avoiding topics that might generate emotional strain, not because the material is inappropriate, but because the institutional climate encourages risk-avoidance in the name of inclusion.
At the same time, inclusion has shifted from a framework aimed at widening participation and removing barriers to one that implicitly seeks to eliminate differential outcomes, drawing universities into a logic that treats divergence in student experience or performance not as a reflection of diversity or academic challenge but as evidence of structural shortcomings.
Alongside these shifts, inclusion has been elevated into a moral identity for universities, reducing a complex set of tensions to a simplistic dichotomy in which institutions are either inclusive or exclusive, with little room for legitimate limits. Yet inclusion, discomfort, and intellectual difficulty can – and often must – coexist, and the task is to manage that tension rather than eliminate it.
The capacity problem
As inclusion intensifies, universities are expected to reorganise teaching, assessment, communication, and campus culture to accommodate an ever-widening array of expectations. Yet institutions aren’t infinitely adjustable – they operate with finite resources, finite pedagogical flexibility, and finite staff capacity.
The assumption that universities can continually re-engineer their practices to meet every evolving preference risks creating an expanding cycle in which expectations grow faster than institutions can respond. The recent proliferation of mandatory EDI training modules, for instance, often positions inclusion as requiring continual curricular redesign, staff behavioural modification, and extensive administrative reporting – expectations that far exceed the original aims of removing concrete barriers.
As the gap widens, the perceived failure to deliver becomes itself a rationale for expanding inclusion further, generating an escalating cycle of promise and disappointment.
The chill on teaching
This dynamic imposes significant burdens on academic staff, who must manage the tension between pedagogical rigour and the need to anticipate and respond to an increasingly diverse set of affective, cultural, and practical expectations. It also encourages the avoidance of difficult or contentious material, since any emotional discomfort may now be interpreted as a failure of inclusion.
The rise of universal content warnings – now sometimes extended to standard curriculum texts or canonical material – illustrates this drift well. What began as a specific support measure for trauma-related needs increasingly operates as a universalised expectation that all discomfort is problematic.
Paradoxically, a concept designed to widen participation begins to narrow the intellectual terrain, making courses safer, smoother, and less demanding at the expense of the challenge and complexity essential to higher learning.
The quiet consensus
The sector rarely acknowledges the possibility that inclusion, if allowed to expand indefinitely, may begin to undermine education itself. Without clear conceptual boundaries, inclusion risks becoming a universal mandate that treats all discomfort as harmful, all difference as disadvantage, and all expectations as justified.
When every aspect of academic life becomes a potential site for inclusion-related intervention, the concept loses definition and becomes impossible to operationalise. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean romanticising discomfort or denying the reality of educational inequalities – rather, it requires recognising that an over-extended inclusion agenda can unintentionally flatten the distinctions between necessary support, valuable challenge, and unreasonable accommodation.
The pursuit of infinite inclusion transforms a valuable principle into an unmanageable ideal.
Inclusion as alibi
What’s most concerning is the extent to which inclusion is increasingly used as an all-purpose justification for policy change. Proposals ranging from assessment redesign to campus conduct rules to staff training programmes are routinely framed as necessary for inclusion, even when their connection to meaningful access or equity is tenuous.
In some institutions, internal debates about anonymous marking, curriculum reform, or lecture recording policy are effectively short-circuited because the label “inclusive” confers automatic moral authority. The rhetorical power of inclusion discourages dissent, stifles debate, and positions policy decisions as morally self-evident rather than contestable.
In this way, inclusion becomes an alibi – an unquestionable rationale that masks uncertainty, disagreement, or competing priorities. When a concept assumes such unassailable status, its intellectual value is diminished, because it becomes difficult to challenge and therefore difficult to refine.
Drawing the line
For inclusion to remain a coherent and defensible principle, it needs to be re-grounded – and that requires renewed clarity about its purpose and limits. It has to distinguish itself from broader aspirations related to comfort, preferences, and outcome parity, and acknowledge that educational environments are inherently demanding, that intellectual difficulty isn’t a sign of systemic exclusion, and that learning sometimes requires discomfort.
It also needs to recognise the legitimacy of staff and institutional constraints, and the need to preserve pedagogical integrity even while addressing inequality – because institutions simply can’t accommodate every conceivable expectation without compromising coherence, quality, or mission. Above all, inclusion must be understood as serving education rather than substituting for it.
What comes next
The sector is at a point where inclusion has become indispensable to institutional identity and strategic discourse, yet its conceptual boundaries have become increasingly diffuse. Unless this trajectory is confronted with rigour and honesty, the widening gap between the expansive theories of inclusion and the practical realities of institutional capacity will continue to destabilise both.
The challenge isn’t to choose between inclusion and rigour, but to develop an approach capable of holding these aims in tension – one that’s ambitious but sustainable, principled but not absolute, supportive but not all-consuming.
Many of the practices gathered under the banner of inclusion aren’t inherently problematic – many are necessary and overdue. The difficulty is that higher education still lacks any shared framework for determining where inclusion appropriately ends, and without boundaries, even well-intentioned adjustments can drift into an ever-expanding mandate that overwhelms academic purpose.
A recalibrated, better-defined approach is now essential – inclusion should illuminate the purpose of higher education, not eclipse it. Only by clarifying its limits can the sector protect both the integrity of inclusion and the integrity of education itself.