Minority Lecturers in Britain Face job Discrimination
by Amy Rosenberg
“So much of getting a job in a university is to do with informal contacts.”
“There are all kinds of subtleties in the way that people treat you, how they speak to you and when they don’t speak to you at all in fact ….This becomes the case especially if people perceive that you remotely challenge their positions.”
“You see undergraduate students from ethnic minorities, and they ask about a career in academic life, but there are so few minority academics and so few professors or heads of department, it is not possible to say ‘look, this is what you can achieve if you get into the system.'”
These statements, for a number of minority faculty members, sum up life in the British academy. Elicited during discussion groups for the Modood Report, a landmark 1999 study on ethnicity and employment in British higher education, they imply both blatant and subtle racism. They point to a system of rampant favoritism (for whites) and concomitant hopelessness (for non-whites).
Within that system, the statements also suggest that there’s a group of individuals who face particular difficulties. These are the roughly 5,000 “contract faculty” — that is, adjuncts — who are
members of an ethnic minority in England’s 120 universities. The Modood Report found that only 6.5 percent of academic staff in UK universities are non-white. While that percentage reflects the
national average, the proportion drops alarmingly when it comes to minority representation in the upper echelons of faculty employment: Only two percent of full professors are members of an ethnic minority. In the words of the report: “minorities are much more likely than whites to be on fixed-term contract.”
Other conclusions in the report are equally sobering: In 1999, one third of British universities did not have a racial equality policy. Of those that did, only four out of ten policies covered contract status; just over half covered career progression. Only five percent of institutions surveyed in the study had a “positive action plan” for
ethnic minorities. And one in five of the minority faculty members responding to the study’s survey said they had personally experienced discrimination in applications or promotions.
Put together by three sociologists from the University of Bristol, the Modood Report represents Britain’s first major accounting of ethnicity in higher-education employment. Since its publication, a slew of similar studies have confirmed its findings. The Association of University Teachers (AUT), for example, (a union for university
faculty with a branch called Black AUT, created to focus on the particular issues faced by blacks employed in academe) produced a follow-up to the Modood Report in 2000. It concluded that “white academics are three times more likely than black academics and twice as likely as Asian academics to be high earners, i.e. on a
salary over 35,000 Pounds [U.S. $50,250].”
In a more recent survey, published in January, 2002, the AUT survey draws the following conclusion: “Approximately one percent of white respondents felt they had been unfairly treated in job applications in UK higher education because of their ethnicity. By contrast, at least one quarter of non-whites felt they had been treated unfairly in these situations.”
A survey published in 2001 by the Commission for Black Staff in Further Education, a group formed following the racially motivated murder of a black university student in 1993, concludes the following: “Fewer than one in 20 senior lecturers are black, and the same proportion — 4.7 percent — of heads of support staff are black.”
While they spout grim numbers, these reports and other similar ones may in fact be harbingers of some hope for Britain’s minority adjunct faculty population. They have caused a stir in the country’s higher-education press, and have already led to some close governmental examination into the possibility that racism is as institutionalized as education itself in British universities.
In 2001, for example, Britain passed an amendment to its Race Relations Act, placing a positive duty on universities to promote race equality. More recently, at the start of this year, a governmental unit was installed with the specific mission of challenging equality policies. Other legislation aimed in part to improve the pay and conditions of part-time faculty has recently passed. Liz Allen, an official at the National Association for
Teachers of Further and Higher Education, sounds forcefully
optimistic when she considers the steps taken toward fixing the current problems: “These things will change,” she says.
Policies, however, can take a long time to trickle down into an individual’s everyday experience, and, as with any institutionalized chauvinism, it takes more than just policy imposed from above to change attitudes on the ground. American minority adjuncts know this all too well, with their experiences of the affirmative action
backlash and their being hired into temporary positions that meet “diversity quotas” on paper for a given year, but do nothing to offer job security, hope of promotion, or fair benefits.
So what’s it like to be “on the ground” in Britain? Who are the minority adjuncts there, what specific difficulties do they face, and how do those difficulties compare with what American minority adjuncts face?
It’s a challenge to get inside the individual adjunct’s experience. One visiting lecturer contacted for this article, a white American in a temporary position at a British university, asked a black colleague, another adjunct, whether he’d be willing to be interviewed. “Interestingly,” she says, “he said quite vociferously that he doesn’t encounter any problems, and then proceeded to
recount many instances when he had.” In the end, her colleague declined the interview.
Indeed, finding any minority adjunct to comment proved a difficult task-and suggested that the group forms an invisible, silent (or silenced) population. One voice was sounded during January of this year, when The Guardian, a left-leaning daily newspaper, ran a series on race in the university. Gargi Bhattacharyya, a lecturer of
South Asian origin at the University of Birmingham, wrote an article that expressed her frustration with the system: “Universities still retain a whiff of the old world- either your face fits or it doesn’t. The well-modulated tones of the senior common room may never break out into open abuse-but you will get the message. The route to career development remains mysterious, decided by who you know and where you go, rather than any more
transparent process.”
Back to the white American who couldn’t convince her colleague to comment on his experiences: She herself is part of a minority in the British university. Though her face may “fit,” she is one of 12,000 non-British nationals working in a UK university. This population makes up 12.5 percent of all academic staff, and about three-quarters of it is white. The reason this is significant, according to the Modood Report, is that non-British faculty are
more likely than British to be on fixed-term contracts: About 60 percent of white, non-British faculty in UK universities work in adjunct positions while about 70 percent of non-white, non-British faculty do.
As in the U.S., gender plays a significant role in determining the chances that one will or will not be hired on an adjunct basis. Across four separate groupings used in the Modood study — non-white/non-British, white/non- British, non-white/British, and white/British — women invariably were more likely than men to be on fixed-term contracts. And, as in the U.S., minority women have
perhaps the roughest deal: “Women in all groups are under-represented in academic posts and more likely to be in fixed-term contract, in part-time and in less senior posts,” the report states. “The position of ethnic minority women, especially the non-British, is the most disadvantaged.”
If there is a significant difference in the situation of minority adjuncts in Britain and those in the U.S., it lies in the types of groups that make up “the minority.” In the States, ethnically speaking, the main minority groups in academe are non-Hispanic blacks and Asians/Pacific Islanders. Hispanics form the next largest group, followed by Native Americans and Native Alaskans. In England, Chinese, “Asian Other,” and Indian ethnic groups have
the largest minority presence in universities; Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Black Caribbean, and “Black Other” form a smaller group, and each category in that smaller group is significantly under-represented, according to the Modood findings. In its follow-up to the Modood Report, the AUT concluded that, on the whole, it is academics of Asian ethnicity who are most likely to be employed on a fixed-term contract in Britain, and to make the lowest salaries.
In terms of the particular struggles, what the studies and reports highlight is that British and American minority adjuncts are in a similar position. Both groups earn lower pay than counterparts in the majority (read: white, male), face explicit and implicit discrimination, barriers to career development, and pigeonholing into adjunct positions. While unions and other organizations are making strides toward changing the system in the UK, more outlets for the minority adjunct voice are needed-just as more are needed in the U.S.
One key step toward improving the situation, as the Modood Report concludes, would be adoption of racial equality policies that “cover contract status and the career development opportunities of fixed-term contract and part-time staff.” The difficulty of achieving
this step is underscored by centuries of discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic, resistance to affirmative action, and the entrenchment of universities in their own racism and classism.
