Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced - racism in Scotland's universities

One of the clear measures of equality is to be found in the profile, by protected characteristic, of those people in employment.  Being in employment can bring multiple, potentially positive, impacts on the lived experiences of many people who share particular protected characteristics.  It can reduce dependence on the less than generous state welfare system and the increasing stigma attached to what little support is provided to people who are jobless for whatever reason.  Being in work provides the opportunities for those previously excluded from key areas of society to be able to influence change and the future shape of societal structures from within.  

In order for Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people to get into work, race discrimination needs to be eliminated.  For that to even begin happen requires an explicit acknowledgement by all public sector bodies that institutional discrimination is alive and well and exists within and across the structures, policies and cultures which create each organisation.  No such acknowledgment has been made by any of Scotland’s universities in the employment data reports they have published over the course of 2019 and which have recently been the subject of research and a report.

Any reading of the workforce data reports published by Scotland's universities reveals that the accessibility to and in them - a key factor in regulations surrounding what should be published - is poor.  Each of Scotland’s universities have managed to produce reports on workforce equality data which are entirely different from the reports of all the other universities.  The university sector in Scotland, taken as a whole, fails spectacularly to reach pass marks in any test against standards of transparency, accessibility and accountability in how they report workforce data.

Reading the published reports also reveals that for universities, publishing the report itself is the end result, instead of the report being an intermediate point on the journey which ends only with the elimination of racism in employment.  This may of course relate to the reports revealing yet another flaw in offering a route map towards the elimination of racism.  None of the universities offers a sense, an understanding, a data picture of what their workforce would look like once racism in employment had been eliminated.  

The level of employment of Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people in Scotland’s universities is obviously underpinned by recruitment from abroad.  St Andrews University reports that over a quarter of their staff have a non-UK nationality.  That being the case, any bench-marking of performance on BME employment equality cannot use, for example, Scotland’s BME population [4% at the 2011 census] as a key indicator, although St Andrews University does try.  

WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] people have held the monopoly on positions of power and privilege within Scotland’s universities as employers for decades, if not centuries in some cases.  Legislation in the latter part of the 20^th century and early 21^st century aimed at eliminating race discrimination has failed to break the monopoly that WASPs hold.  The requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and specific equality duties in Scotland have found universities locked into a sterile two-year cycle of gathering workforce data and publishing often inaccessible and ineffective workforce profile reports – while the baseline evidence they reluctantly disgorge tells us that nothing is changing.  Evidence of race equality – or race discrimination - remains shrouded behind an opaque curtain of unexplored and disconnected silos of employment data on ethnicity and nationality.

Many decades ago, James Baldwin offered the view that nothing can be changed until it is faced.  Evidence published by Scotland's universities themselves suggest that racism in Scotland's universities will not be eliminated for some decades yet, as Scotland's universities are still not ready, able or willing to face the institutional racism embedded in the sector.