The Arday case should prompt a rethink of university autonomy

Whatever else it may be, the Jason Arday affair is an illustration – and an acceleration – of the cultural right’s attacks on universities for supposedly being eroded by a fashion for inclusivity that overrides academic merit.

At the same time, however, it has also amplified the view widely held in progressive-radical circles that academia largely remains stacked again visible minorities, riddled with privilege, hypocrisy, prejudice and double standards. A lot is at stake, and, even in the wake of Arday’s tragic death, the finger-pointing goes on.

One thing we can surely agree on is that UK higher education remains implausibly white at the top in terms of the professoriat, senior academic office holders and, of course, vice-chancellors.

A former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission vividly described, 20 years ago, the traffic outside his office of distinguished black and brown mid-career academics, medics and others who had been passed over for promotion. Since then, many universities have made modest changes to their procedures to ascertain intellectual merit in hiring and promoting. But while progress since then has been more than glacial, it has been a lot less than required.

The 2023 Ethnic Representation Index highlights unexplained imbalances that persist throughout the sector. Only about 8 per cent of senior university executives are ethnic minorities, as against 19 per cent of academics and 33 per cent of undergraduates in the sector. And that is not surprising given that black and brown academics are routinely subject to higher standards of scrutiny, typically from the outset. They are more likely to be queried over their outputs and claims, and they are more likely to be referred to internal conduct investigations. As many anecdotes make clear, life can suddenly be made very, very hard for impressive ethnic minority academics who are thought to be getting too big for their boots and criticising, however obliquely, the mediocre white men around them.

To be fair, academia is not the only supposedly liberal profession that has problems with discrimination and bias. Law and media are another two prominent examples. When this was pointed out in a 2016 Policy Exchange report that I led, the reaction from the leaders of these professions illustrated that a raw nerve had been touched.

But academia is arguably worse than most professions thanks to its ill-placed adherence to its ancient and murky methods of agreeing on intellectual merit, which, deliberately or otherwise, tend to further prejudice.

Nor has the situation been improved by the rapid corporatisation of universities over the past two decades, which has meant that management skills are now valued alongside academic merit in senior hires. Yet beyond a clutch of high-profile EDI chiefs, top academic and research roles continue to be distributed among existing cliques, while under-represented minorities languish in junior roles on precarious contracts that render them more likely to be laid off when cuts need to be made.

Some elite universities have made practical efforts to rectify the problem. And in pursuit of a quick fix, some corners have undoubtedly been cut, where promising minority academics have been given senior opportunities slightly before, rather than after, making their greatest contributions. Over-promoting and over-claiming are not the solution either. Equally, many minority academics who have succeeded are beginning to have an impact on reforming procedures and practices.

Either way, overcoming the under-representation problem at scale will always be difficult until the sector accepts that its systems and ways of doing things are the source of bias and unfair treatment. And it will be all the harder in the wake of Arday’s treatment, which will have a chilling effect on promotion applications from minority academics. Although it will be for the coroner to rule on this, it seems likely that the biggest contributory factor behind his death was his employer suddenly withdrawing its previously staunch backing for him. Whatever the “new information” was to which the University of Cambridge attributed its about-turn, announcing it in the midst of a media frenzy belied the duty of care it owed its then-employee.

In fact, the chilling effect is likely to extend beyond minority academics. More than ever, appointments to top posts will now have to satisfy the expectations of very different and highly polarised interests, which is impossible to do. As a result, few serious academics will apply for them, and few search and promotion committees will relish the challenge. The likely result is that senior appointments will get even whiter.

So what is the solution? While traditionalists in particular might baulk at the idea of the sector’s splendid autonomy being encroached upon, my view is that it is time for some outside oversight and intervention. After all, universities receive lots of public money – and few objections about “wokery” or falling standards have been made about the access and participation plans that all English universities are required to deliver to the Office for Students, which have resulted in the significant opening-up of even Russell Group universities to applicants from state schools.

External scrutiny of senior appointments would not be comfortable for universities. But while there would be loud complaints from those academics who reflect the values of cultural conservativism and who want to uphold their autonomy at all costs, their indifference to whiteness at the top of academia is not universally shared across the sector.

And for those many talented black and brown academics who have been shabbily treated by their liberal profession in the past, maintaining unsullied the sector’s splendid autonomy is the least of their concerns.

Shamit Saggar is executive director of the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) and a visiting professor at the Policy Institute, King’s College London.