Tackle racism as HE dealt with sexual harassment

Universities should adopt the same kind of approach to tackling racism as they used to deal with sexual harassment and mental health and well-being, the chair of the Universities UK advisory group on tackling racial harassment told higher education leaders this week.

“We don’t need to collect any more evidence. Repeatedly asking BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] students and staff to tell their stories and capture their experiences before instigating action only serves to re-traumatise,” Professor David Richardson, vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia (UEA), told the Universities UK webinar titled ‘Turning words into actions: Eliminating racism and racial inequality in higher education’ on 14 June.

The webinar was held to discuss how universities can harness the momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement for tangible, permanent action to address racial inequality affecting students and staff, and heard from several black academics and student leaders on what needs to be done.

Uproot and dismantle and decolonise

Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, vice-president for higher education of the National Union of Students UK, told universities: “Be prepared to be radical in finding solutions. Accept that racism and its history is deeply embedded in our educational system. Don’t just seek to adjust and repair, but instead uproot and dismantle and decolonise.”

She called on higher education leaders to treat black students, and their representatives, as partners and to see their experiences as “honest and true accounts of how racism manifests itself in our sector”.

Gyebi-Ababio also warned university chiefs against putting black students or other minority marginalised groups “in a position where we expect them to come up with solutions to their own oppression” and urged vice-chancellors to “take responsibility and be accountable for tackling racism in every part of their institution and the sector”.

Dr Jason Arday, assistant professor in sociology at Durham University, said: “There are pockets of good practice, but we need a uniform institutional-wide approach, properly resourced over a sustained period of say five to 10 years.”

He complained that BAME staff, particularly black women, were all too often “unfairly burdened with the task of race-work” and called for a “collective endeavour to dismantle racism”.

He added that there was a need to “re-conceptualise white allyship” as the contours of racism are changing in both higher education and society at large.

Cultural change

Professor Richardson, the sole white speaker on the webinar, was closely involved with the Universities UK task force set up in 2016 to tackle violence against women and hate crimes.

“We produced action-based guidance to turn words into action and bring about cultural change,” said Richardson, who was appointed last year to chair the Universities UK advisory group to tackle racial harassment.

“Unfortunately, the same level of clarity has not been afforded to tackling racial harassment to date,” said Richardson, who added that the 2019 Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on Tackling Racial Harassment: Universities challenged highlighted the scale of the problem facing higher education.

“BAME students at UEA have shared with me emotional and upsetting experiences and I have pledged to take action to lead change from the very top and it has to come from the top,” Richardson told the webinar.

“We know we have a problem and should take action and the advisory group that Universities UK has asked me to chair is drawing expertise from inside and outside the sector, including from BAME students,” he said.

Advice out by the autumn

“We are building on the success we have had with the cultural guidance to tackle sexual harassment, and more recently around mental health and well-being, and will have the advice on tackling racial harassment out in the early autumn,” pledged Richardson.

He said: “Efforts to address racial harassment in isolation are not enough. As vice-chancellors we need to focus on a range of concrete activities across our universities, including pay grades, increasing representation and embracing decolonisation – and perhaps white vice-chancellors, like myself, taking allyship training as all of our senior executive team are doing this summer at UEA.

“Some vice-chancellors say it takes time to change culture, but I believe people have run out of patience.

“Recently we’ve shown how we can change the entire delivery model of 150 UK universities in the face of COVID-19 in just the space of a few days, or a few weeks.

“My challenge is to see similar fast progress in changing words into action on all forms of racism, including racial harassment and discrimination in our institutions,” said Richardson, who urged all vice-chancellors to make this central to their post-COVID-19 five-year plans.

League tables partly to blame

Baroness Valerie Amos, director of the SOAS University of London, who chaired the webinar, said white allyship meant “giving up some of your privileges to mobilise BAME individuals who are often marginalised”.

She blamed university league tables for being part of the problem. “They don’t measure inclusion and diversity and the progress universities are making in tackling discrimination and inequality. We need to ensure that league tables look at a group of measures around race and the attainment gap because measurement as accountability is crucial.”

She predicted “push back against this because some of our universities that are now at the top of the table will be much, much further down” but rejected any suggestion that this was being too political.

“Universities are meant to be enablers and educators and this would actually be doing what they say on the tin about promoting excellence, about promoting inclusivity, finding ways of rewarding innovation and creativity; but what we are doing is leaving out huge swathes of our students because of the way we operate. In my view this is not a political conversation; it is about inclusion and the way our institutions function.”

Amos said she believed senior university leaders had been reluctant to make commitments to tackle racism in the past, not because they were worried about being too political, but because “they are concerned about making statements they are not able to deliver on”.

Gyebi-Ababio told the webinar that decolonisation would play a key role, saying: “Tackling racism doesn’t work when you do it in pockets. It has to be a wholescale transformative action to eradicate racism from our society and from our education sector. You can’t silo it off.”

Amos responded by saying some academic colleagues felt “a bit defensive” at talk of radical cultural change in higher education, and suggested: “Decolonisation should be seen as part of a series of collective actions. That way you have a better chance of getting people on board.”

Nic Mitchell is a British-based freelance journalist and PR consultant who runs De la Cour Communications and blogs about higher education for the European Universities Public Relations and Information Officers’ Association, EUPRIO, and on his website. He also provides English-language communication support for European universities and specialist higher education media.