Black and minority ethnic staff face ‘disadvantage’
April 22, 2012 in Blog, Gus in the Media, Print
(This article was originally published by the Times Higher Education)
Efforts to promote race equality in higher education have petered out and had “little impact”, a conference has heard.
Speaking at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Leeds on 13 April, Andrew Pilkington, professor of sociology at University of Northampton, said the impact of initiatives to encourage race equality in academic recruitment under the Labour government had been “short-lived”.
Efforts to ensure gender equality far outweighed those to eliminate racial discrimination, argued Professor Pilkington, whose books include Institutional Racism in the Academy: A Case Study.
Diversity issues had “fallen down the agenda” in the past decade, he added, while the government now paid only “lip service” to race equality matters.
He quoted from a 2003 report carried out by Gus John, visiting professor of education at the University of Strathclyde, which said that “results suggest that many universities were still struggling to come to terms with what the legislation requires and that they remain on a steep learning curve”.
“Evidence [pointed] to failures in data gathering and target setting, [which] suggests that many universities have not taken equal opportunities policies seriously”, he said.
Picture (homepage): ”FBI Classroom“, by billerickson (Flickr)
Click here to keep reading this article published by the Times Higher Education.
Supporting Global Majority (so-called Black and Minority Ethnic) Staff in Higher Education:
Professor Gus John was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFC) for England, Scotland and Wales between 2002 and 2007 to conduct research on the performance of higher education institutions in their respective funding areas in implementing equality legislation, in particular the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000.
Prof John not only delivered a composite cross-sector report to each Funding Council, he submitted a confidential analytical report to each institution with detailed findings and firm recommendations as to the actions they needed to take in order to improve their performance, promote equity and inclusion and eliminate discrimination.
Many black and global majority staff in Higher Education, however, are finding little evidence of their institutions implementing those recommendations. Concerns about recruitment, professional development and progression of such staff remain, added to the experience of seeing global majority staff numbers decrease as a result of cutbacks on account of budgets.
Against that background, Prof John is being asked increasingly to support Black Staff Networks in Universities, including Russell Group institutions such as LSE, UCL, King’s and Imperial, in devising measures for influencing the strategic management of their institutions and, out of their experience, examining the fitness of policies and procedures to do with key functions such as: recruitment, internal promotion, grievances and complaints, equality impact assessment (especially of downsizing and ‘rationalisation’ programmes), research bursaries, graduate employment, etc.
As members of those networks point out, the HE sector does not appear to see the irony in embracing ‘widening participation’ initiatives to attract more global majority and white working class students to higher education, while at the same time failing to motivate, treat equitably and retain staff from those backgrounds whose presence and performance are among the ‘pull’ factors on which many such students decide to make those their institutions of choice.
‘Race’ in particular remains a huge challenge for the management and governing councils of HE institutions in the UK.