It does matter that just 0.4% of British professors are black – 50 out of 14,385
Another day, another story of disproportions. Too many black youths being jailed, too few black youths achieving at schools, too few making their way to our elite universities. Now we know that when they do make it to university the chances of them encountering a black professor seem fairly remote. Does this matter? I think it does.
Not perhaps in terms of gaining qualifications. There's no doubt other professors from a variety of backgrounds impart knowledge to everyone as best they can, without discrimination. But it matters in terms of aspiration. Black professors represent success. Human beings like to replicate success. They show the gifted student what is possible if they work hard. Their scarcity, by contrast, douses ambition. And more than anything else, we need ambition.
So what's happening here? A lack of transparency, I suspect. The light seldom shines on the internal working of our higher education sector. When it does, what we see isn't pretty. Self-perpetuating elites, heads of faculty raising aloft others who remind them of themselves. A failure to progress talent through the system. Not racism, per se, but institutional racism if we are to use the term as was intended by old Stokely Carmichael when he invented it: processes and structures that when taken together – and often involving people of genuinely good intent – result in unwanted and discriminatory outcomes. So if the survey findings prompt pause for thought at our universities, that's a good thing.
But let's be honest; the institutions aren't the only ones that need to be doing some thinking. Whatever happened to the dream deferred? It was our dream. Are we doing enough to fulfil it? History tells us that the attrition level of black people in the professions will always be higher, so to achieve anything like the standing we would like to see, the number of people entering the professions must be greater. That isn't happening. This is not lack of potential. It's lack of confidence. We don't, partly because we don't think we can unless it involves sport or the music industry. If I meet one more young man whose plan A, plan B and plan C is to be a rapper, I'm going to scream.