Why universities keep forgetting their anti-racism commitments

There’s a pattern in higher education that anyone working in this space will recognise.

A high-profile event forces race onto institutional agendas, statements are issued, working groups are convened, action plans are drafted, and for a period, the language of anti-racism moves from the margins of corridor conversation into the senior leadership suite. And then, gradually, it slips away again.

I’ve spent years researching equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education, and what I keep encountering isn’t straightforward negligence, but a structural tendency to treat anti-racism work as an event, rather than an ongoing institutional commitment that requires a systematic effort.

The sector often describes this as “institutional amnesia,” but universities aren’t forgetting. What we’re actually seeing is a failure to build systems, accountability, and funding structures that survive the winds of change in leadership priorities and budgets.

The domino effect in leadership

When a vice-chancellor who championed race equality leaves, their commitments rarely transfer to their successor with the same velocity.

When the director of EDI exits and the post sits vacant for eight months, momentum built over years can drain away. High institutional turnover rates and changes in senior teams mean institutional priorities shift, and work that was never formally embedded into governance structures or funding cycles becomes easy to deprioritise.

This issue isn’t unique to EDI, but race equity work is particularly vulnerable, partly because it so often depends on the personal conviction of key individuals, rather than the structural authority of the institution itself. Without mechanisms that outlast any given person, progress becomes contingent on personnel.

It’s also worth being direct about something the sector’s current language often obscures. Diverse leadership is not, by itself, a solution. A senior team that’s more racially representative, but hasn’t interrogated its own assumptions about merit, belonging and professional legitimacy, will reproduce many of the same patterns their visibility appears to resolve. Representation is necessary, but not sufficient in itself, as leaders, whatever their background, need to be willing to examine the gatekeeping decisions they make.

Research on ethnic diversity in UK higher education leadership continues to find that barriers to progression are sustained by opaque promotion processes, limited sponsorship, entrenched in ideas of professionalism, and organisational cultures that reward conformity to existing norms rather than challenge them.

Even where institutions have increased representation, structural, and cultural barriers often persist, while some equality initiatives remain largely symbolic rather than transformative.

In that sense, institutional amnesia is not simply about universities forgetting past commitments, but about organisations repeatedly mistaking visible diversity for cultural and systemic change. The danger is that once a leadership team appears more representative, institutions can assume progress has been achieved, leaving intact the underlying assumptions, informal networks and gatekeeping practices that shaped exclusion in the first place.

There’s a glitch in the system

Even where leadership commitment is genuine, a second gap tends to undermine it.

Anti-racism promises frequently fail to be embedded into the systems that govern how a university actually operates, whether that’s within its recruitment and promotion processes, its curriculum review cycles, its research culture or its governance framework.

A university that launches a race equity taskforce in June 2020 and produces a commendable action plan by December is not the same as a university that has changed how it hires, how it allocates research funding, how it evaluates academic performance, or how it supports its Black and racially minoritised staff day-to-day. The difference between the two is one is prioritising policy, and the other is prioritising practice.

HESA data published in early 2026 found that of the 26,110 academic staff employed at professor level across UK higher education in 2024/25, only 270 are Black. That’s 1.03 per cent of the professoriate. The number has risen slowly over time, but the professorial gap, the difference in the proportion of White and Black academics who reach the top, shows no clear sign of closing.

This is the accumulated outcome of systems that haven’t changed enough, if at all: appointment processes that reward particular forms of cultural capital, promotion criteria that disadvantage those carrying the heaviest pastoral and representational burdens, and an absence of the mentorship and sponsorship networks that accelerate careers for those outside the dominant group.

Postgraduate and PhD admissions present a similar problem. Where processes are opaque and dependent on personal networks, they reliably reproduce existing hierarchies. My own research on the experiences of Black women at Oxford and Cambridge, and my work on the Generation Delta project at the University of Leeds – which aimed to increase the number of racially minoritised postgraduate researchers in UK higher education – and the Black Professors Project at the University of Cambridge, have reinforced how much informal filtering mechanisms shape who gets to enter and advance in academic careers.

Action plans don’t fix these issues unless they’re designed to reach into the systems and change them, and the professorial gap demonstrates why. Decades of diversity initiatives have modestly increased representation, yet the structures governing appointment, promotion and recognition continue to deliver profoundly unequal outcomes. Institutional amnesia persists whenever universities celebrate symbolic progress while leaving these underlying mechanisms intact.

The personification of institutions brings notions like institutional amnesia to the fore in efforts to remind them of their prior commitments. Institutions don’t, however, have memories, people do.

The best organisations thrive on impeccable systems management and cultural cohesion. Systems should be altered to reflect organisational change priorities. Without systems enhancement, there’s limited organisation impetus for maintaining change work beyond the organisational lifespan of change champions.

Put your money where your mouth is

The third gap is perhaps the most telling.

When budgets tighten, EDI functions are almost always among the first to absorb cuts, which has become acutely visible in the current financial crisis gripping the sector.

As of 2025, UK universities collectively hold approximately £9.5 billion in debt, with around 60 per cent operating at a loss. An estimated 9,000 people across 165 institutions have faced compulsory redundancy. In this environment, the work that’s hardest to defend in the language of institutional survival becomes expendable, and race equity work is routinely framed that way.

Yet this framing reflects a deeper misunderstanding of what race equity work actually does.

As I argued earlier, institutional amnesia often begins with the withdrawal of long-term financial commitment. The first justification is almost always that “the budget has changed,” or that organisational priorities have shifted. But when race equity initiatives are treated as peripheral projects, rather than core institutional infrastructure, they become vulnerable to precisely these cycles of forgetting. Once funding disappears, momentum disappears with it. The commitment remains in strategy documents, but not in practice.

What’s often presented as a regrettable but necessary trade-off is actually a choice. And it’s a choice that carries real costs.

There’s growing evidence that diverse staff and leadership teams improve student outcomes, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds. When a university’s academic community doesn’t reflect its student body, that gap has consequences for belonging, attainment, and retention. Race equity isn’t a discretionary social good that institutions can afford to set aside during lean years. For many universities, it’s directly connected to whether students complete their degrees and what they achieve when they do.

The problem is that universities still too often treat this work as though it exists outside their core mission. Equity initiatives are justified as matters of social responsibility, rather than educational effectiveness, making them an easy target when finances deteriorate. But if better outcomes, stronger student engagement, and improved continuation rates are institutional priorities, then race equity work should be understood as part of the solution, rather than a goodwill cost centre.

It’s also worth remembering what universities were originally built to do. The University of Sheffield, to take one example, was partly funded in 1904 by penny donations from local steel workers, factory workers, and miners. Communities invested in the idea of higher education as a shared good. That original social mission of universities hasn’t become less important, and if anything, the current financial crisis makes it more urgent to ask who universities are serving today, who they are allowing to fall away, and how we can recentralise the shared good many institutions were founded upon.

What a reset would actually look like

None of this means progress is impossible.

What it does mean is that good intentions alone aren’t good enough, and neither is the cycle of pledge, report, and drift that the sector keeps repeating.

What’s needed is structural change. That includes, multi-year, ring-fenced investment in EDI that’s not subject to reallocation when deficits emerge, accountability mechanisms built into governance frameworks that function regardless of who leads the institution, clear targets with public reporting, as well as promotion and appointment criteria that are genuinely scrutinised for how they disadvantage racially minoritised staff.

It also means a willingness, at the most senior level, to treat the underrepresentation of Black colleagues in the professoriate not as a pipeline problem to be solved in the next strategic plan, but as an internal systemic failure that demands concrete action now. And a recognition, across management at every level, that systemic change isn’t something that happens to an institution, it’s something that people within it choose to make happen.

We’re all too familiar with thinking about higher education as an ivory tower with glass ceilings, but we’ve failed to acknowledge that the doors are welded shut.

Those who are already inside reproduce themselves, and only some of those who are outside manage to squeeze their way through a broken window. It’s time to take the welded steel doors off their hinges and instate structural pillars that can hold the weight of change. Durable change requires systems that outlast individual champions, leaders who are willing to challenge established assumptions, and organisational cultures that reinforce rather than undermine those efforts.

This is where conversations about institutional racism and institutional amnesia can sometimes become unhelpful. The language is intended to draw attention to systemic problems, but it can also obscure the role of individual decision-makers. Institutions don’t forget on their own. People decide which priorities receive funding, which recommendations are acted upon, which appointments are made, and which concerns.

Universities are institutions reproduced through individual choices and built on the idea that knowledge requires rigour, evidence and honest engagement with what the data shows. The data on race in higher education isn’t ambiguous, and applying the same rigour to institutional practice that the sector demands of its research isn’t an unreasonable standard. The test is whether the sector has the will to hold itself to it.