InFocus: Dr Akira O’Connor on St Andrews receiving a Race Equality Charter (REC) Bronze Award
Updated: Oct 18, 2024

On Tuesday, 1 October, it was announced in a Press Office Statement that the University of St Andrews received a Race Equality Charter (REC) Bronze Award. The achievement is the culmination of hard work done by a team that has been dedicated to striving towards the award for the past two and a half years. Dr Akira O’Connor was appointed Chair of the REC team in February of 2022 and spoke to The Saint about how he led the endeavour.
The REC Award is an accreditation administered by the charity organisation Advance HE, which describes it as helping “institutions in their work to identify and address the barriers facing Black, Asian, and minority ethnic staff and students, while also providing a framework for action and improvement.” An institution can apply for either a Bronze or Silver Award “depending on their progress.”
Applying for the REC Award was a multifaceted process that involved evaluating “the University’s performance in a range of domains that included local environment, staff, students, and also the curriculum,” O’Connor stated.
“We had to essentially analyse data and look at the kind of patterns in the data, try and explain what was going on and try and identify any areas where minority ethnic staff and students were being disadvantaged or were not achieving as well as their white counterparts,” O’Connor continued. The result of this in-depth data collection is a document around 200 pages in length that will be made available publicly in the coming months.
Another project O’Connor and his team embarked upon was the REC Action Plan. Aiming to proactively analyse and act upon the data gathered in the aforementioned document, the Action Plan spans 20 pages and covers 50 actions that the University will be committed to accomplishing in the next five years, hopefully with lasting positive impacts.
Actions include events such as a University-wide lecture on race and ethnicity, as well as solidifying plans for Schools to implement intercultural and diversity training.
“One of the really exciting things as well is actually a scholarship fund for Black British students that we’re going to be pushing forward as part of the five-year Action Plan,” O’Connor said. “The University has already committed some funds, not insubstantial funds, actually, some quite significant funds, and that was commended by Advance HE in their feedback to us.”.
The final major portion of the REC application was the assemblage of the Self-Assessment Team (SAT), comprising 60 people split into four working groups. These groups discussed the culture surrounding racial equality at the University and how to improve it.
O’Connor believes that one of the most important aspects of his work and of his team is ensuring the information that has been aggregated for the REC application is managed the right way. The REC research is centred on a community, and should be treated as such. “We’re trying to make the data and the process as transparent and as open as possible. I think one of the issues that we’ve dealt with, when it comes to race equality and equality issues in general within the University, is that sometimes there’s a lack of understanding of what has gone into [decisions] the institution has made. We’re trying to put that right. We’re trying to rebuild trust in that process again,” he said.
A focus on collaboration and remodelling structures to be more conducive to EDI work is a key part of O’Connor’s own approach to leadership and his delegation of leadership to others. “I’m really proud of the way within the Self-Assessment Team, we did things differently and built a lot of community,” he said, going on to express that, typically, universities are hierarchical institutions in which leadership roles are allocated to people depending on academic seniority.
“People of colour in particular often aren’t elevated to positions of seniority within the University,” O’Connor said. “So one of the things I wanted to make sure of was that in our own domain of working on race equality, we didn’t reproduce those failings within the University’s hierarchical system. So, we made sure to point people to the leadership of these groups who hadn’t reached the pinnacle of their careers.”
This way of managing a team, O’Connor emphasised, is primarily about providing people with opportunities that would not otherwise be afforded to them. “It doesn’t mean you’re compromising on leadership, because you’ve got people in these positions who are good leaders, cultural leaders in a range of domains that just aren’t recognised by the university.”
O’Connor felt there are many things to be proud of about the REC team’s efforts, but in the future, because all members of the project were so dedicated, he believes compensation going to the people doing work like this could be more equally distributed. “Two of the actions within our Action Plan are to figure out ways in which we can better deal with that problem of compensating people for their time across all staff. And the second action is relating that to students. I want to make sure that by the next time we do this, everyone feels that they are being compensated adequately for their time,” he said.
EDI work is a continuous process, and at times, O’Connor acknowledges, it can be difficult to grapple with this with patience while setting other people’s minds at ease. “When the email was sent round announcing the Race Equality Charter Bronze Award, I got responses from people saying, ‘Well, it’s all very well the institution is doing this, but there is this issue that is present within the university, or there is this issue that is present in the School of X. That’s a really difficult tension to maintain,” he expressed.
“Of course I’m proud about having got the Bronze Award, but the Bronze Award is the award for recognising the problems and getting a plan. It’s not actually an award for fixing things. We’ve recognised where there might be issues and we’ve put those in a document. In doing that and then talking about that we’re actually surfacing more issues, so it can feel a bit like you’re digging a hole on the West Sands and the more you dig, the more the walls fall in … but we will get to a point I think where, with that culture of open[ness] and honesty, it’ll be a bit more straightforward to see where the problems are.”
In the end, EDI work is about believing in a better future, and O’Connor embodies this with his work as REC Chair. On whether he thinks working towards the REC Awards makes a difference in the University, he said, “Of course, I’m being optimistic. I don’t think I’d be able to do this job if I wasn’t optimistic, but I think there has to be a capacity for positive difference here … I think it’s worthy work that has been done by an amazing, amazing team of people who have been involved.”
Photo by Gayle McIntyre
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