Liberalism and Race Equality in Higher Education: The Shift from the Mandatory to the Persuasive

This paper examines a twenty year period to explore the salience of race equality in higher education in the UK. While research evidence accumulates to demonstrate that staff and students from minority ethnic groups continue to experience considerable disadvantage, universities throughout the period have typically remained remarkably complacent. Such complacency partly stems from the dominance in the academy of a liberal as opposed to radical perspective on equality. Universities typically see themselves as liberal and believe existing policies ensure fairness and in the process ignore adverse outcomes and do not see combating racial inequalities as a priority. The paper distinguishes two ideal typical approaches, the ‘mandatory’ and the ‘persuasive’ to the promotion of race equality and suggests that the period has witnessed the transition along a continuum from the mandatory to the persuasive. Regardless of which approach is preferred, universities are urged to have no truck with a deficit model and to see it as their responsibility to take action to ensure more equitable outcomes.