UK universities have a real problem promoting Black academics

It’s really coming to something when official statistics that put the proportion of professors in UK universities who are Black at 1 per cent turn out to be something of an overstatement.

This month saw the publication of the latest Higher Education Statistics Agency data on the make-up of the UK’s higher education workforce, showing the situation as it was on 1 December 2019 (pre-Covid). One of the headline statistics pulled out for the press release sent out to journalists was that “155 professors (1 per cent) were Black”.

Depressingly, this is actually rounded to the nearest 1 per cent. The 155 figure represents just 0.68 per cent of the 22,810 staff defined as “professors” by Hesa. Of those 155 Black professors, 130 are in England, 15 are in Scotland, 5 are in Wales and there are none in Northern Ireland. Hesa rounds its figures to the nearest five, which is why the total does not equal the sum of the individual country numbers.

UK HE-watchers know only too well that this is a stubborn problem. The consistently low proportion of Black professors has long demonstrated how few Black students who enter the university system feel they have the inclination and the support to progress to postgraduate study and on to academic jobs. This is, and always has been, a pipeline issue: it is not simply a case of promoting Black academics (although that is a huge part of it); it is also about making the UK academy a place where Black people want to work.

Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union, said institutions “must do more to ensure a more representative mix of staff at a senior level and stop this terrible waste of talent”.

There are some first steps that could be taken quite easily. Why, for example, isn’t the Race Equality Charter mark a condition of research funding and a condition of registration with England's higher education regulator, the Office for Students? Should universities be able to access the student loan book without being able to demonstrate a commitment to ensuring parity for Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff?

Optimists might point out that in last year’s data there were 140 Black professors, meaning that the 155 figure represents an annual increase of more than 10 per cent. It would be remiss, however, to celebrate increasing the overall proportion from 0.65 per cent to 0.68 per cent.

Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University, told Research Professional News that nobody “should be surprised about the lack of change in the numbers” of Black academics and professors at UK universities. He said that there was a “myth in society” that universities were bastions of “left-wing ideals and commitments to multiculturalism”.

“In reality, the university has [been], and continues to be, the source of racist ideas and has one of the least diverse, more elite workforces,” he said.

Last summer, of course, many universities made pledges to tackle structural racism and the barriers facing Black students and staff in higher education, following the international Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The data published this month come too early to judge whether there has been any impact on the statistics, but Andrews doesn’t expect to see any rapid change.

“As one of the very few Black professors in the UK, I have seen almost no change in the approach of institutions. There was a lot of lip service after the BLM protests but there has been no commitment shown to address the crisis of representation in staffing,” he said.

There has been similarly sluggish movement in other areas, too. It remains the case that significantly less than a third (28 per cent) of professors are women, up from around 27 per cent in 2018-19 and 26 per cent in 2017-18. That means higher education is on course to achieve gender equality at professor level by 2043.

It goes without saying that this is also far, far too slow.

This is an excerpt from a longer analysis written for Research Professional News.