A new book calls on white academics to engage in ¡°meaningful collaborations¡± with black colleagues in order to break down long-established structures of ¡°whiteness and privilege¡±.

Deborah Gabriel,?senior lecturer in marketing and communications at Bournemouth University, is also a consultant in educational equity and the founder and director of??Her new collection,?Transforming the Ivory Tower: Models for Gender Equality and Social Justice, brings together contributors from Australia, Canada and the US as well as the UK. It is designed to demonstrate, she explained, how ¡°black and brown women are active agents of change¡±. Much of it explores ¡°self-reparation¡± and ¡°the work we are doing among ourselves for our own empowerment, giving us voice and visibility, enabling us to tell our truths¡­But going forward, we will be focusing on projects that facilitate political and economic empowerment.¡±

In response to the 2017 collection she edited with Shirley Anne Tate, Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, Dr Gabriel reports in her new book, she had ¡°many responses, especially from white male academics, [saying] they found our narratives constructive and insightful¡± or ¡°offering support¡±. Yet she was ¡°frustrat[ed] that whiteness and privilege remain intact and stronger than ever¡± ¨C as indicated, for example, by the fact that ¡°93?per cent of professors [in the UK] are white¡±.

She ends the new book, therefore, with a call for ¡°meaningful dialogues and collaborations with white colleagues [while] refus[ing] to engage with tokenistic gestures that make no real contribution to challenging the status?quo¡±.

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It was ¡°a?waste of time¡±, in Dr Gabriel¡¯s view, when universities complicit in racism ¡°jumped on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon because of pressure from students¡±. Instead, within a broad ¡°focus on truth, justice, reparation and equity¡±, she wanted to see white academics using their privilege to speak up in institutions where there were no black staff above a certain level.

Universities needed to put in place ¡°specific, concrete and measurable¡± initiatives such as reparative academic development programmes, she said; these could select five or 10 black graduates each year and give them additional support alongside their master¡¯s courses with a view to increasing the number of black academics by 10 or 20 over the next three to five years.

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Instead of conferences that scrambled around to assemble a diverse panel of speakers at the last moment, Dr Gabriel asked, ¡°Why aren¡¯t we involved from the outset so we can help shape it?¡± As a positive example, she cited a 2018 event at London South Bank University to mark the centenary of some women getting the vote in the UK, where she was pleasantly surprised that ¡°the keynote speaker talked about race from the very beginning ¨C it wasn¡¯t just added on at the end. I?told them it was the first event I?had attended that looked as if it was developed from the ground up from a very culturally democratic position.¡±

It was also crucial, as Dr Gabriel saw it, for university leaders to ¡°take more responsibility¡± and to ¡°start holding deans and managers accountable¡­for advancing the cause of inclusivity and equality in teaching, research or professional practice¡±, when all too often ¡°faculty regimes ¨C the policies, the procedures, the key performance indicators ¨C actually create a black underclass¡±. She would even like to see financial penalties, perhaps imposed by the Office for Students, for ¡°institutions not improving the pay gap. Only financial measures motivate institutions to change¡±.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com