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How is your institution enabling Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff and students to thrive? Is your institution effectively tackling racism?
Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the higher education sector has started making bold commitments to dismantling structural racism. However, big questions remain about how higher education can combat institutional racism and achieve real change.
This book disrupts the higher education sector through ambitious actions and collective, participatory and evidence-informed responses to racism. It offers a roadmap for senior leaders, staff and students to build strategies, programmes and interventions that effectively tackle racism.
Arising from current staff and recent student experiences, this book supports institutions driving equality, diversity, inclusion and intersectional programmes in higher education.
Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is a direct response to the calls to actions and progression in developing and practising anti-racism across the higher education sector. Higher education as a sector and universities play a significant role in advancing society, providing opportunities for people and communities to be liberated and successful through education. Universities hold an intrinsic role in local and national communities and play a significant role in bringing diverse talent to different areas of the United Kingdom. The conception of this book came through the collective action with racialised people of colour who continue to live through, witness, see, hear and be exposed to all forms of racism, from covert exclusion to barriers in career progression and through to the widening degree-awarding gap and cultures that prevent university staff and students from being successful and having the same opportunities as their White counterparts in higher education.
This chapter focuses on all postgraduate students and the issues of racism faced by them in their university journey. Postgraduate students who are engaged in taught and research programmes experience their education uniquely compared with the undergraduate student. Broadhead et al (2020) explored Black, Asian and minority ethnic students’ experiences of postgraduate degrees, highlighting critical concern about the widening gap in degree continuation rates ‘where only 83% of BAME students continued their studies compared with 90% of White students’ (p 2). Furthermore, Black, Asian and minority ethnic postgraduate students were found to feel less engaged with the curriculum due to its Eurocentricity, isolated and lacking in confidence to discuss race issues with White staff (Broadhead et al, 2020).
This chapter interrogates the pervasion of racism in research funding, with regards to issues faced by staff in bidding and managing research grants and contracts with local, national and international partnerships (Li et al, 2021). There are racial disparities of research grants and bids, reflected in the number of grants awarded to Black, Asian and Ethnic minority researchers in higher education being much lower than White applicants for research funding. The role of contracts and funding in research collaborations are considered here as areas for change, particularly with regards to managing funding and contracts with integrity and eliminating racism through vetting, while ensuring research contracts are held with partners that champion or are on an explicit journey to becoming anti-racist.
For this chapter, the notion of research excellence, research awards and the research excellence framework (REF) are significant contributors to disempowering Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff from progressing in their research careers in academia (Rees, 2020). The notion of research excellence is noted to ‘typically promote destructive hyper-competition, toxic power dynamics and poor leadership behaviour’ (Obasi, 2020). The REF’s 2021 equality impact assessment highlighted that more needed to be done to include ethnic minority groups into the process (Reid, 2020). However, the impact assessment makes no mention of intersectionality, or the experience of female Black African and/or Black Caribbean staff that are highly under-represented in academia and in the realm of research excellence.
When exploring research collaborations in this chapter, evidence shows that national and international research partnerships are often created by senior staff through tokenism and nepotism, which is highlighted when it comes to topics of authorship and peer review (Sandstrom & Hallsten, 2007; Silva et al, 2019). With the rise of international collaborations as an indicator of research excellence, there is still little attention paid to the continuous inclusion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic academics in the context of research collaborations (Parker & Kingori, 2016).
Funding for developing teaching and scholarship staff and teaching fellows is a critical issue for Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff who are affected by a poorer quality of working life, and less success in gaining teaching awards to develop their careers (Hey et al, 2011). In this chapter, it is noted that teaching contracts can often be amended to inhibit staff in pursuing meaningful professional and faculty development opportunities and effective teaching partnerships, which are the essence of advancing scholarship, student experience and outcomes (Borah, Malik & Massini, 2021). With the rising number of teaching scholarships and teaching fellowships in universities, these scholarly partnerships enable universities to advance their widening access and internationalisation strategies. The role of teaching contracts, funding and collaboration are intrinsically linked, and it is Black and ethnic minority higher education teaching staff that are most marginalised in their contract and teaching experiences (Brewis, 2019).
The introduction of teaching excellence, teaching awards and the teaching excellence framework (TEF) can be counterproductive to creating a thriving teaching culture for Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff in progressing their teaching careers in academia, particularly with a focus on higher education as a market and a form of consumerism that can lose sight of critical discussions concerning pedagogy, learning and teaching theory (Tomlinson et al, 2020). It is this current notion of teaching excellence that is embedded within the racist and White supremacies identified within the ideas of research excellence (Obasi, 2020), and these are further explored in this chapter.
This chapter explores the role the higher education community as a collective of the higher education system, who may currently self-describe as ‘allies’ in the journey to becoming anti-racist. The label of ‘allies’ is contested given its colonial and imperial roots; however, with this exception in mind and until a more suitable position is derived, this is the term utilised and reclaimed in the face of tackling racism. Advancing race equality and wider diversity and inclusion work is not possible without understanding and mobilising solidarity across communities, workforces and society (Ulug & Tropp, 2021). It is through solidarity that an acceleration change can happen to advance race equity, diversity and inclusion.
When reflecting on the role, position and furthering of anti-racism in higher education, I use this chapter to reflect on the vastness of action that needs to take place in order to meaningfully advance race equality, and embed race equity, diversity and inclusion as an urgent priority in the higher education system. This chapter shares final thoughts with the reader to enable and empower them to stand against racism and positively act for those that are not represented across the hierarchies that pervade in higher education.
