Elite universities ‘only support diversity if it benefits them’

Elite universities’ diversity and widening participation initiatives are self-interested “performative acts”, the authors of a new book on inequality in higher education have claimed.

Elite Universities and the Making of Privilege: Exploring Race and Class in Global Educational Economies, co-authored by Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers, alleges that institutions will support such measures only when they benefit from them.

Much of the research for the study is based on interviews with students at four elite universities in the UK and the US, where, Professor Bhopal said, racism is often “very overt”.

According to the authors, their interviews reveal that access to elite universities is managed through gatekeeping systems and processes that legitimise race and class inequalities.

Professor Bhopal, professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham, said elite universities tended to be composed of predominantly white, middle-class individuals from wealthy backgrounds who are on a “journey of privilege”.

They will “only invest in equality policies if it benefits them more than the groups at which it is aimed”, she said.

“Of course, universities will invest in the Race Equality Charter or decolonising the curriculum because it benefits them more, because they want to be seen to be a university that is interested in race equality, especially after George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Professor Bhopal, who is also director of Birmingham’s Centre for Research in Race and Education.

She said many of the institutions that were tweeting about their anti-racist policies during the Black Lives Matter protests were the same ones admitting low rates of black, Asian and minority ethnic students.

“These elite universities can afford to be complicit in perpetuating racism because it doesn’t matter to them. They are elite – that’s the point – and they always will be, so they can pick and choose the students they want.”

She said widening participation schemes and diversity drives were simply “performative acts”, and that it was not in a university’s interest to change its ways.

“It can sometimes feel to us that changes have been made, but we argue that this acts as a smokescreen for the overarching contributions of race and class.”

Attending an elite university allows people to get a job anywhere in the world because top institutions have become brands as “instantly recognisable” as Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Chanel, added Professor Bhopal. The possession of an expensive handbag can say a lot about an individual, she said, but the possession of a degree from a top-tier institution can signify much more.

The authors’ research – which focused on postgraduate students – found that the application process to top institutions was heavily weighted against disadvantaged young people.

Their interviews found that when students of colour and poorer students do gain access to elite universities, they often find themselves positioned as second- or third-class citizens within the institution. Many of those interviewed said they had experienced racism first-hand and had been told that they were there only to “fill a quota”.

Nevertheless, Professor Bhopal did suggest some ways forward – including participation targets for applicants from postcodes that are known to have high levels of deprivation.

She also suggested that the UK should consider creating institutions akin to America’s historically black colleges and introducing degrees focusing on black studies, as already exist in the US.

Dr Myers, assistant professor of social sciences at the University of Nottingham, said affluent white middle-class families did very well out of a system that had been built around their interests, their forms of knowledge and their experiences – to the detriment of lots of other people.

“The biggest damage is that there are groups of people whose futures are simply never going to be as fulfilled as those who come from other types of families.”

Despite having promised repeatedly to rectify inequality, universities are “designed to endlessly reproduce an outcome which benefits a very small cohort of people, and they do that in endless ways. They’re not about fixing the problem – they’re about negotiating through to the next year.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com