Protecting Whiteness through ineffective WP policies and practices

As I argued in the literature review chapter, WP policies have been largely ineffective in improving access of BME students to high status universities and improving their outcomes. In this section I argue that the way that the WP policies have been enacted can be described as reluctant, superficial and inefficient, both at nationwide level and at the investigated universities and that this can be seen as an example of protecting the whiteness of the HE field. This subsection cuts across the questions mentioned above in the chapter – of concentrating on UG education and student deficit. At institutional level, I argue, this reluctance to enact change manifested itself in university staff seeing WP work as a burden and an add-on to regular activities, pertinent to issues of access to UG education and engaging in it with minimum effort at PG level. At the national level it manifested itself by the lack of follow through in evaluation and consequences for failing to meet targets. Following CRT, this can be explained by the intersection of interest convergence and whiteness. Interest convergence stipulates that progress towards racial equality happens due to there being vested interests for the dominant groups, rather than their moral awakening and that such progress is only partial and temporary (Bell, 1980). The latter stems from whiteness, which by definition aims to maintain itself, therefore, any actions to dismantle it will be undertaken reluctantly, at best (Gillborn, 2008). Thus, having WP policies can provide an element of interest convergence. It can allow more non-traditional students, including students of colour into the field of HE, which, as I argued earlier provides additional fees income and looks good from a diversity standpoint. However, the limited scope of the policies, i.e. concentrating on students rather than institutions and the ineffective way that these policies are enacted results in upholding whiteness.

Academic staff engaged in discourses that can be described as resentful toward WP work, which I argue can be an example of WP being seen as an add-on rather than an integral part of the PG field. When I was talking about contextual admissions with Peter, head of the statistics department at the University of Confidence, he revealed that WP was seen as a burden:

Peter: The real problem for the [university] is that there are targets on students from deprived backgrounds, students from state schools and that sort of thing. And that pressure…, it’s put on the [university] by government and comes down to departments and… it is quite difficult to see what to do, so we’re encouraged, for example to do outreach to go out to talk, give talks in schools in deprived areas and try to encourage students.

Interviewer: And you do that, a lot of that?

Peter: No, it’s staff time, it’s the constraint, everybody is very busy.

(Peter, head of department, University of Confidence)

John, a graduate tutor at the University of Confidence, engaged in a similar discourse in the following quote:

I know that [University of Confidence] has put a lot of thinking into this [WP] and we have this problem of faculty going out and its very labour intensive.

(John, graduate tutor, University of Confidence) Both Peter and John seem to be framing WP in the discourse of burden (“the real problem” and “labour intensive” outreach). In Peter’s understanding the WP imperative is driven from the government and is operated all the way down to the level of institutional departments. However, he does not feel supported enough to know how to meet the targets stemming from Access Agreements, and more importantly, he indicates that WP activities are not a priority as they are not taken up due to time constraints, with teaching and research given more significance. This, I argue, may be interpreted as WP activities and ethos being seen as additional features, an add-on, rather than embedded within the

institutional habitus and everyday university undertakings, structures and policies. That is to say, that the WP habitus and the habitus of the HE field do not align and support each other.

In the interview with Fred, head of graduate school at the University of Books, following on from the discussion on WP outreach (quoted earlier in the chapter) I asked him about the importance of issues of equality and diversity:

Interviewer: How high on the agenda is equality and diversity? Fred: Very high, all the time.

Interviewer: And how does that operate, how does that show itself? Fred: Well, for example, every time you make any decisions in any meetings, at the end of the meeting, you consider whether it has any implications in terms of equality and diversity. So, you consider that and if there are any issue you discuss it and if there aren’t that’s it.

Interviewer: Could you give us an example of that … what might be an illustration of that?

Fred: There is rarely anything that comes up, because it’s got an

implication that would mean that is biasing one group against another, so if it did then you would discuss how to avoid it, but I can’t remember a time when it happened, but it will be an item on the agenda.

(Fred, head of graduate school, Univesity of Books) Fred’s words can be interpreted as a sign of the University of Books

approaching issues of equality and diversity in a very instrumental manner rather than offering an in-depth engagement. Having equality and diversity consideration on the agenda as standard, while not actually considering it allows presumably majority White academic staff members to protect their White privilege and shield their White fragility – understood as the discomfort at discussing issues of ‘race’ (DiAngelo, 2018). In turn, this preserves the status quo while paying lip-service to the equality and diversity and WP

considerations.

Lizzy, PG admissions manager at the University of Confidence, displayed what can be interpreted as a very limited understanding of issues of equality at PG level.

Interviewer: So, basically, we want to know what the universities are doing, what is working for those underrepresented students and what is not working.

Lizzy: There is – I don’t know if anyone talked to you about the Postgraduate Support Scheme.

Interviewer: Yes.

Lizzy: Yeah so you know that new bursaries are coming, you know about that as well.

Lizzy: I probably cannot. If you know about, it is probably as much as we do.

(Lizzy, PG admissions manager, University of Confidence) When asked about what the institution was doing to support underrepresented students at PG level, Lizzy referred to simple solutions of financial support in the form of the Postgraduate Support Scheme (PSS) – which was a HEFCE funded project which provided financial assistance to PG students for a year, as a way to investigate the need for postgraduate loans system (Morgan and Direito, 2016). This, as I argued in the sections above does not provide a comprehensive solution to the issues that students of colour may be facing in PG education, as well as aims to exonerate the institution from the responsibility to change its policies, practices and habitus (thus engaging in the student deficit model). Moreover, Lizzy seemed to display very limited will to talk about the PSS justifying it with limited knowledge of the programme. I argue that together – the simplistic solutions as well as the lack of will to engage with them – can be seen as an example of reluctance to enact any significant change to dismantle whiteness.

In the following quote, Kathleen, head of WP at the University of Merit, can be seen as revealing another aspect of the lack of dedication to enact change:

I think one of our weaknesses and I probably said this to you before is, we do a lot, but we haven’t had the time and the space to evaluate work as well as we’d like to

(Kathleen, head of WP, University of Merit) As Kathleen discussed earlier, most of the work of her team is to do with pre- university outreach and financial support for students on-course. Here, Kathleen admitted that her team does not evaluate their activities. Kathleen’s team is not an exception as most WP teams in England have been found to have poor impact evaluation schemes prompting calls for improvements in the area (BIS, 2014; Doyle and Griffin, 2012; OFFA, 2016). Therefore, I argue that without robust evaluation WP teams cannot fully understand the impact of their work and thus cannot improve their activities to enact meaningful changes. And therefore, regardless of their intentions, they allow whiteness to be perpetuated through inefficient WP policies and their reluctant enactments.

This apathy to enact real change can also be seen at a national level,

particularly at research-intensive universities. Access Agreements which have been obligating universities to meet WP targets for over 10 years have been consistently unmet by Russell Group institutions (Byrom, 2009; OFFA, 2016). At the same time, none of the universities have had their Access Agreements unapproved and as a result did not have the ability to charge higher fees withdrawn. Therefore, I argue that the punishment for poor widening participation outcomes has been merely formal and that the lack of real

consequences can be interpreted as the reluctance to dismantle whiteness. The new legal framework of the OfS and APPs promises to change that with strict evaluations and targets on outcomes (OfS, 2019), however, the actual

implementation and enactment of the policies remain yet to be seen and assessed.

5.6. Conclusions

This chapter took a critical look at widening participation policies and practices. In particular, linking nationwide policies with how they were enacted at

institutional level allowed me to deconstruct the WP discourses shaping experiences of BME students. I argued that within the intersections of socio- economic class and ‘race’ the WP policies were disproportionally and negatively affecting BME students. This, I argued was due to side-lining the issues of ‘race’ to provide more socio-economic focused solutions, mainly in the form of

financial support, which on its own was not enough to address the issues that BME students may face in HE. This is because students of colour do not only face financial barriers to participation, but also systemic racism and whiteness (Bhopal, 2018). On the other hand, I argued that the reverse policy, i.e.

stripping away financial support, had potentially more negative impact on BME students because of their high numbers in medicine aligned areas where the support was diminishing. I also argued that concentrating WP policies and discourses on (access to) undergraduate education was not only diverting attention from issues at PG level, but also provided an excuse for staff not to engage with the issues at that level, which can be interpreted as protecting whiteness and White privilege. I further deconstructed student deficit discourses as attempting to shift the blame for underperformance of BME students away

from the institutions and onto students themselves. To provide a real change universities should move away from the student deficit model and instead look at changing institutional cultures (McDuff et al., 2018) with WP being an integral part of that transformation of the PG and wider HE field, rather than as is now, with WP working as an add-on operating within the constraints of the system. As the data in the final section of the chapter suggested, the way in which WP has been enacted could be characterised as, at best, reluctant at institutional and nationwide levels, which can be seen as an example of whiteness

attempting to preserve itself. And while WP practitioners may be well-meaning people, i.e. good White people (Castagno, 2014; DiAngelo, 2018), CRT

explains that the intentions of people are irrelevant when the results are

unequal. Thus, WP remains a highly needed yet inefficient policy which needs to be reconceptualised to provide a real benefit to students of colour,

particularly at PG level. The next chapter deals with institutional examples of how practices and discourses within the PG field influenced the lived

6. THE WHITENESS OF THE PG FIELD – RACIALISED