Race Inequality and the University: British and American Perspectives

Original video: https://youtu.be/RaDpZdUouwY?list=PLqeK6hQme1Y4eFpmqoSCuD0NgMkonZzTw

Professors NiCole Buchanan & Keon West - Race, Inequality and the University: British and American Perspectives

Scholars in institutions of higher education face unprecedented challenges to their academic freedom and scholarly autonomy. These burdens, while experienced broadly, may be most keenly felt by those who experience marginalization in academic spaces (e.g., faculty of color, first generation, or queer faculty) and may be most pronounced when these scholars study topics related to their marginalized identities. In this talk, we examine mechanisms that may explain these disparities and how they manifest in both the United States and the United Kingdom. We identify structural and procedural barriers that inhibit academia from achieving diversity goals and reaching its full potential for scholarly innovation (e.g., tokenism, epistemic exclusion, identity-based and scholarly biases). We review the ways in which these challenges reflect and reify racism in academia and discuss strategies to foster greater equity and inclusion in higher education and academic research.