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The uneasy place of equity in higher education: tracing
its (in)significance in academic promotions
Mark Barrow
1
&Barbara Grant
1
#Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract
Throughout the West, efforts to achieve equity for students in higher education have met with
mixed success. Much extant literature focuses on the position and perspectives of students in
relation to this wicked problem: our research turns the spotlight onto the role of academic staff.
In an effort to understand equity’s mixed fortunes more forensically, this article offers a case
study from a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study outlines the
current context of ideas about equity in national government and institutional policies, then
traces the life of those ideas inside one particular yet ubiquitous institutional process: the
promotion of academic staff. Promotion is a potent moment of academic subject formation
where, in order to participate, individuals must account for themselves as promotion-worthy
through presenting a comprehensive dossier in response to a detailed set of norms. Our
research explores the extent to which institutional promotion processes suggest the necessity
of an Bequity-active academic subject^as well as the kinds of equity-active subjects who
emerge. Our analysis of institutional documents and interviews with colleagues involved in
promotion decision-making processes suggests that, despite an inevitable institutional rhetoric
of commitment to equity, the concept occupies an uneasy, even risky, place in the academic
promotion process, and that responsibility for equity remains largely stuck to equity bodies.
This small study contributes to a deeper understanding of the obstacles—contradictions
even—equity faces within university culture.
Keywords Academics .Faculty.Policy analysis .Promotion .Student equity.Tenu re
Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0334-2
*Mark Barrow
m.barrow@auckland.ac.nz
1
Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
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