Chris Bunting, THES, October 2004
Shortly after being told she was being elevated to a professorship, Cecile Wright received a call from an academic in her field. "It was a white colleague of mine. He was clearly incensed and he said, quite bluntly, that I had only been promoted because I was black."
Four years later, Wright is still puzzling over the comment. It is not so much the offensiveness of what was said or the way in which it undermined her that keeps bringing Wright's thoughts back to it. She says she has had to get used to overt racism from colleagues during her academic career. It is the bizarre separation from reality in her colleague's mind that fascinates Wright.
Far from favouring black and other ethnic minority
academics, Wright, professor of sociology at
Nottingham Trent University, believes British higher
education is riddled with racism.
"The situation in academia with regards to race is
absolutely disgusting and shocking. This is the one
area of British cultural life where institutions are
able to discriminate with impunity. In the health
service or in schools, it would not be allowed to
happen because there is more scrutiny. Universities
are able to hide away because they are seen as liberal
institutions, because they supposedly have liberal
values," says Wright.
A look at the facts of racial minority representation
in Britain's academic profession suggests there is a
serious problem. Figures from the Higher Education
Statistics Agency for 2002-3, the latest available,
show that people from racial minorities make up just
over 10 per cent of those employed in academic jobs.
It is a pretty respectable figure, given that ethnic
minorities only made up 8 per cent of the population
and 8.3 per cent of the workforce in 2003.
However, the more you unpack these statistics, the
more Wright's use of the word "shocking" seems
appropriate. To start with, the large majority of the
ten per cent are at the bottom of the ladder. People
from non-white backgrounds make up 17 per cent of
researchers, just under nine per cent of lecturers,
six per cent of senior lecturers and 4.4 per cent of
professors. About 60 per cent of whites have permanent
contracts, compared to 38 per cent of non-whites.
There is a narrow ray of light if we do an age break
down of these figures. As a whole, ethnic minorities
are younger than their white counterparts: 87 per cent
are below 50 years of age compared to only 70 per cent
of whites. It might be argued, therefore, that the
snapshot provided by the HESA statistics gives a
misleading picture of a dynamic situation in which a
ethnically diverse younger cohort has yet to replace
an overwhelmingly white older generation.
Unfortunately, the clouds quickly gather again if we
begin to examine exactly what academia's ethnic
minority population actually consists of. Fifty four
per cent of ethnic minority academics in the UK, whose
nationalities are known, are foreigners. Nearly 80 per
cent of people who describe themselves as Chinese and 45 per cent of Indians
come from abroad. What seems to be happening is large
numbers of young academics, developed and nurtured in
foreign educational systems, are taking thousands of
often low ranked, casualised jobs. They are helping to
mask the fact that, far from over representing
domestic ethnic communities in the way that academia's
proud 10 per cent minority participation rate implies,
British universities massively under employ them.
Again, number crunching is the best way to demonstrate
the extent of the problem. British people from
Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds make up 1.9 per
cent of the population and 0.62 per cent of people in
professional or managerial positions in wider society
but only 0.4 per cent of academia, mainly in low
grades. Despite being significantly over represented
in the student body, British Indians make up 1.7 per
cent of the population, 1.93 per cent of managers and
1 per cent of academics.
Black people, narrowly defined as people who come from
African roots, are perhaps the clearest example
because of the length of time their communities have
been established in the UK and the extent to which
they are excluded. About 1.4 per cent of academics in
the UK are black, hardly a figure to be proud of
because black people account for 2.1 per cent of the
working aged population and 1.9 per cent of managers
or professionals. However, take away the 715 black
non-British people from these figures, and we find a
black British participation rate of about 0.8 per
cent.
Even if we count the foreigners, the picture
becomes steadily more depressing as we try to scale
the academic career ladder with this small group.
British and non British black people make up 1.4 per
cent of people in research positions, 1.6 per cent of
lecturers, 0.66 per cent of senior lecturers or
researchers and an infinitesimal 0.29 per cent of
professors. In the 2003 HESA survey, there were only
38 professors out of over 14,000 who classified
themselves as "black", "black Caribbean" or "black
other".
To get a better understanding of just how nonplussed
Professor Wright at Nottingham was by her fellow
academic's idea that she had only reached her
professorship because of preferential treatment
because she was black, we only have to ask how many
other black women professors there are in the UK?
According to the HESA figures, which must carry a
health warning because they rely on the sometimes
unpredictable way in which people classify their own
ethnicity, there are nine black women professors. Five
of these are in nursing.
If you search for women black professors outside the
medical field, you will find only two in the HESA
tally: a professor of IT at Brighton University and
Heidi Mirza, a racial equality studies professor at
Middlesex University who is in fact of Indo-Caribbean
background. In the broad acres of the humanities and
social sciences, disciplines which have produced
endless hand wringing articles about racial and gender
issues over the past four decades, Wright appears to
stand alone as the only black woman professor.
"It is ironic really that someone should be saying I
was only a professor because I was black," Wright
says, laughing. "The higher you get up the academic
system, the more isolated your situation becomes as a
black academic... The career progression is almost
nil. That is where the personal racism is likely to
play out. For those few young black people who do come
into academia, they see the experiences of people
older than themselves in the system and they see an
unhappy experience. We have had our stars, people like
Paul Gilroy, going over to America because they see a
future for themselves there."
Talk to black academics and the anecdotal evidence of
racism is overwhelming although most do not want to be
identified in print for fear of being labelled as
whiners. One 50-year-old, working as a business
studies visiting lecturer in a new university, said he
had watched numerous less qualified white colleagues
moved into permanent posts while he had spent seven
years on fixed term contracts. Another had been passed
over for a professorship in a research area in which
he was an established authority in favour of a white
academic who did not research in that area and was
only a lecturer. Yet another said he had spent seven
years applying for professorships but was constantly
told that, although his research record was
"impeccable", he was "not a match" for the
departments. On two occasions, he said he had received
apologies from successful white candidates who felt
they should not have been given the job.
William Henry, a lecturer in Goldsmiths College's
sociology department, says: "I'm on a one year
contract and I'm finding it difficult to get short
listed for jobs. There is always some barrier. They
might say 'your book hasn't been published' or
something like that and then you have to watch people
being employed who don't have these things. If you
don't get your foot on the ladder in a full time
contract what hope have you got of developing the
profile you need higher up the ladder. Even getting
published is a problem because the publishers don't
take what I am writing about, black culture,
seriously."
Richard Majors, former head of Glasgow University's
centre of learning and support and a leading
researcher into black participation in education, has
been astounded by the racism he has found since moving
to Britain from America nine years ago.
"These universities are some of the most elitist
institutions in the world. They are some of the most
conservative organisations, run by some of the most
conservative people in this country," he says. "You've
got this group of white guys making decisions about
hiring, firing and promoting. How can you ask this
group of people in their 50s or 60s, who often come
from privileged backgrounds, to be sensitive about
race, colour, class or consciousness?"
According to Majors, the problem stems not only from
explicitly racist decision making but also from an
unquestioned devaluing of the areas many black people
want to research. "The truth is that in this country
if you want to research black issues, history or
culture it is seen as something not quite mainstream.
This is not the case in the US but here you are seen
as peripheral. They might refer a student to you if
they want to do something on black issues - we are
good enough for that - but when it comes to the RAE or
promotion into senior posts they don't take this kind
of thing seriously," he says.
"How do we change this? There are numerous things that
have to be re-examined but fundamentally, if we are
going to have systematic change, it has to start at a
senior management level. If we can get a black person,
or even a white person who is working class, we might
be able to start the process that is needed in these
institutions." Until that revolution begins to happen
across the system, Majors believes, Britain's ivory
towers will remain whiter than many in these
supposedly liberal institutions like to imagine.