Power, institutional protectionism and the disinclination of minoritised employees to raise complaints in UK universities

In UK universities, racism and microaggressions experienced by minoritised employees and their inclinations to raise informal and/or formal complaints, warrants further scrutiny due to the persistence of racism within society and Higher Education settings. Drawing from Critical Race Theory and adopting an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 30 minoritised employees from ten UK universities. Our findings demonstrate that participants’ experiences ranged from othering to unequal access to professional advancement, leading to perceptions of systemic racism. Fear of reprisals, being misperceived as problematic employees, and anticipated negative consequences for employment security, generated reluctance to take recourse in complaint procedures. Individuals who escalated concerns found that they were not believed, exacerbating their marginalisation. The proclivity for organisations to prioritise institutional reputation elicited feelings of pessimism that anything would change. We propose co-constructed recommendations for improvement, calling for scholars to further probe their potential for facilitating anti-racism within universities.