Zombie data, racial moral panic and the professional managerial classes in British Universities
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is the U.K.’s leading independent statutory body responsible for encouraging equality and diversity. In October 2019, it released a series of shocking reports that purported to show that racism is endemic in Britain’s higher education sector. The EHRC’s claims were picked up by media outlets worldwide and triggered a wave of responses among the sector’s leaders.
The most notable of these was the UUK’s report, Tackling racial harassment in higher education, that endorsed all the usual ‘woke’ ideology: microaggressions, critical race theory, ‘whiteness’ and the top-down, illiberal technocratic managerialism so beloved of the Professional-Managerial Class that litter University leadership teams, and British institutional life more generally (see this great Twitter thread for some reading on these PMC elites). A phalanx of brain-dead NPCs parroting the Equality, Diversity Inclusion catechism (EDI): “must do better/allyship/unconscious bias/intersectional/structural/systemic/whiteness.” Note, the UUK is the lead organisation that helps form the worldview of University Vice-Chancellors.
The UUK and EHRC reports argued that the problem was so significant that new laws and regulations were needed to adequately address it.
When these first came out, Wanjiru Njoya and I wrote a critique of these reports and the very substantial problems with them. These problems were related to the shoddy data, methods and more problematically, the elasticity of key concepts used to evidence widespread racism (what is little more than a form of paranoid and bad faith clarivoyance: microaggressions).
The excellent liberal anti-racist organisation, Don’t Divide Us (of which I am a proud signatory when originally founded) also did a great critique of the UUK reports. They wrote to the EHRC and received a gracious response back from Baroness Falkner who, I think it’s fair to say, acknowledged that the methodology and data used in the EHRC reports were somewhat lacking.
Nonetheless, like a zombie data trope, these reports continue to be cited by what is little more than self-interested business charities (what I have called the Grievance Industrial Complex), corporate trainers pushing their EDI products and evangelising University leadership teams, all of whom have adopted ‘intersectional’ ideology.
The EHRC reports form the data bedrock for the ongoing racial moral panic across UK campuses and our PMC overlords, most of whom have fully supped at the Kool-Aid cup of intersectional theory.
This theory argues that identity characteristics such as race, sexuality and gender are part of a kaleidoscope of intersecting oppressions. As Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality’s principal theorist explains, it is “about how certain aspects of who you are will increase your access to the good things or your exposure to the bad things in life”.
It thus foregrounds immutable identity characteristics as the central aspect of politics and political struggle and largely rejects the more materialist and class-based analysis of what we might see as the ‘old’ left. In the purview of modern identity politics, it is thus more than feasible that a female ethnic minority Professor educated at Cambridge may be considered more oppressed than, for example, a white working-class porter at the same institution given the various oppressive intersections of her race or gender identity.
More troublingly, it essentially reverses the liberal and universalist anti-racism of giants such as Martin Luther King. It is not interested in the content of one’s character or common humanity, but instead in one’s group identity and weaponising these identities into a free-for-all. The underlying goal is to achieve a form of social justice measured by the imposition of equal outcomes by our PMC overlords for the various victim groups that need ‘saving’, and that are sacralised, infantilised (see the excellent Shelby Steele on this) and placed within an ideological intersectional matrix of structural oppression.
British Universities and the Race Equality Charter
How does this all tie back to British universities? They continue to be criticized for the alleged underrepresentation of ethnic minority staff and students. This disparity is an important element of a broader moral panic on UK campuses and is being used to drive through the decolonisation agenda and a very strong push to further 'diversify' staff and students.
Advance HE is the organisation responsible for the "Race Equality Charter". The guiding principle of the REC is that "racial inequalities are a significant issue within higher education" and that "UK higher education cannot reach its full potential unless it can benefit from the talents of the whole population and until individuals from all ethnic backgrounds can benefit equally from the opportunities it affords".The alleged lack of diversity amongst staff and students is key to sustaining these assertions.
Indeed, Alison Johns, Advance HE’s CEO recently argued that whilst “not all commentators agree that there is racism in UK higher education, the evidence says otherwise – and we, as a sector, have a legal and moral duty to do something about it”. She continues that “while black students are generally more engaged with their studies, they are consistently scored lower: 86 per cent of white students qualify with a first or 2:1 – for black students, the figure is 66.3 per cent”. Beyond students, there is a similar disparity with staff “where 89.1 per cent of professors are white, and 0.7 per cent are black; you are twice as likely to be a professor if you’re a white academic than if you are black”. Dismissing critiques of her REC as part of a culture war, she insists that it is instead an evidence-based approach.
However, her own organisation’s data completely contradicts the guiding principles used to justify its own REC, and the broader narrative that an alleged disparity, therefore, equals structural racism and discrimination. See Thomas Sowell on this (question: how come a prolific African-American intellectual giant like Thomas Sowell is never cited by our PMC saviours?)
For example, Advance HE's own 2021 Staff Statistical Report shows a clear trend toward greater diversity within the UK university sector. To quote directly: between "2003/04 and 2019/20, the proportion of all staff who were UK white steadily decreased (from 83.1% to 70.0%), while all other groups increased, most notably those from non-UK white backgrounds (from 8.3% to 14.6%)". They go on to show that during "this same period, the proportion of all staff who were UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic increased from 4.8% to 8.5%, and the proportion of non-UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff increased from 3.8% to 7.0%".
The non-white UK population is 14 per cent. The figures show a disproportionate overrepresentation of BAME staff across the UK sector and a very clear trend of ever-greater BAME staff numbers year on year.
These numbers are very stark in certain subject areas. For example, "areas with the highest proportions of UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff were clinical dentistry (25.1%), chemical engineering (21.7%) and electrical, electronic and computer engineering (21.7%)" whilst BAME non-UK "academics working in electrical, electronic and computer engineering" comprise just under 58 per cent of staff and almost 47 per cent in business studies. Even amongst the most senior of staff at professorial level, "there was a small difference between the proportions of white and Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff who were professors (11.6% and 9.5% respectively)". However, when we disaggregate the BAME category there are notable differences. Specifically, "17.0% of UK Chinese academics were professors compared with just 4.0% of UK black academics".
Regarding senior managers and administrators, the data shows the opposite of what is being claimed, which is now helping drive through the intersectional inspired and PMC driven 'diversity and inclusion' agenda in UK universities. Senior managers from the UK academic population make up 1.3% of all UK academics. Of this 1.3%, senior managers from the UK white population were 0.9% (87% of the white population as a whole) with UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic academics 0.4% (13% of the UK BAME population). Moreover, the median pay gap between UK white and UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff is zero.
How about the student population? In 2021, 25.3% of students at UK universities identified as Black, Asian and minority ethnic. This represents an astonishing rise in diversity amongst students, with 2021 477,355 UK domiciled students identified as Black, Asian and minority ethnic representing an 82.3% increase from 2003/04 numbers. Even at Oxford, traditionally seen as a bastion of privilege, more than 22 per cent of its undergraduate students starting in 2019 were Britons from BAME backgrounds, up from 18 per cent on the previous year's admissions. In short, BAME students are overrepresented relative to population size, as are senior managers and academics across the seniority range.
Advance HE is an organisation at the forefront of leading cultural change of 'diversity and inclusion’ by pushing its REC as the answer to widespread racial discrimination across the University sector.
However, their data analysis shows the opposite of what they claim: a rich diversity of BAME staff and students that on a demographic basis is over-represented, and at staff levels across the seniority ranges. The narrative underpinning the ‘Race Equality Charter’ is totally at odds with the reality and a reality that Advance HE’s own data scientists show.
More broadly, British taxpayers and the Government must ask themselves how happy are they to see huge sums paid to organisations like Advance HE, whose own CEO, in a piece decrying criticism of her organisations as part of a culture war, cannot even cite the correct stats from her own organisation?! Johns stated that Universities needed the anti-racist product her organisation sells (the REC), partly because “where 89.1 per cent of professors are white, and 0.7 per cent are black; you are twice as likely to be a professor if you’re a white academic than if you are black”. Meanwhile, her own organisation states categorically:
Should UK taxpayers continue to pay for what is alleged to be a data-driven anti-racist toolkit that cant even get these basics right?
A correspondence theory of knowledge at the heart of EDI ideology
Aside from this data, the decolonisation /EDI agenda to diversify staff rests on an odd assumption but one common in the social justice movement and intersectional theory. In what we might call a correspondence theory of knowledge, primacy is placed on the correspondence between the immutable identity characteristics of a teacher and student.
First, this implies an assumed affinity between teacher and student based on race or another form of identity. As such, social justice is achieved through diversifying teachers based on immutable identity characteristics. However, surely what is important in the relationship is the veracity of the information and knowledge being imparted and the quality of the teaching? Why and in what ways is the ethnicity or background of those taking part in knowledge exchange relevant? Do the laws of physics somehow change depending on the ethnicity of the professor and her students? Of course not.
Second, racializing knowledge in this way is a form of imposition that underplays diversity. For example, by coding staff and students as black, people from a range of diverse backgrounds, from the Caribbean to Nigeria, are all lumped into one generic ‘black’ category. The same could be said for white staff and students, with those from the UK coded the same as those from, for example, Russia i.e. from very different cultures and historical traditions. Why would a white Professor born and educated in the former Soviet Union have more cultural affinity with a white British student than a black British professor teaching white undergraduates born in the UK? This correspondence theory of knowledge racialises knowledge exchange.
Third, and as a result of the above, the correspondence theory of knowledge is explicitly ideological. Drawing from intersectional theories of identity, it imposes this schema on the world and thus privileges its own priorities (identity) over other values such as excellence, hard work or merit. Indeed, these values have come under explicit attack by intersectional ideologues as evidence of white supremacy!
Food for thought!