Is higher education ready for equality? Perceptions of managers on equality at higher education institutions

Is higher education ready for equality? Perceptions of managers on equality at higher education institutions

2020-2021 | EDGE-VUB

Objective

The aim of this project is to investigate the views, attitudes and perceptions of the elites in HEI regarding diversity policies. Research shows that the politicization and polarization around certain diversity policies influence people’s interpretation (Scarborough, Lambouths, and Holbrook 2019). Therefore, we want to understand how managers interpret these policies. Based on the collected survey-data, we want to qualitatively assess their opinions on diversity policies looking at why they do or do not support these policies. We will link their reasons for (non-)support to how they explain inequality and their gender and racial attitudes. Furthermore, we allow for an examination across race, gender, nationality, and age as American research has previously documented social divisions in support of (both public and private) policies concerning equality (Sears, Sidanius, and Lawrence 1999). Furthermore, we will use mixed-methods as we will conduct in-depth interviews to provide the quantitative data with added support by looking at the discourse they use in talking about equality. We follow Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind discourse to test whether this is prevalent among HEI managers (Bonilla-Silva 2017).