• To what extent are individuals personally responsible for their success?
• What is the justification for some people earning more than others?
• What does ‘social solidarity’ mean to you? 

In this post I’ll provide an overview of Holmwood’s discourse, before moving on to answering the above questions

Holmwood introduces the article identifying the fact that higher education in the UK, or more specifically England, is experiences profound changes due to the application of neoliberal public policy. Although the financial current crisis of 2008 called into question such policies, Holmwood argues the paradoxical consequence that governmental responses has subsequently reinforced such policy and has on effect extended them into new areas, in higher education the introduction of student fees being indicative of this shift.

Holmwood goes on to contextualise this shift within the UK by reference to similar trajectory in the United States as a move from “higher education as a social right “towards it being a “personal responsibility of individuals and their families” (Holmwood 2018:2). The egalitarian tradition represented by the expansion of publicly provided higher education in the US following WWII is argued to have been undermined by the shift, though both strands of HE provision, public and the neoliberal, are characterised as deeply racialised (and gendered), the central and vital point made over this paper. Regarding the latter, Holmwood convincingly challenges the notion of the neutrality of “the market”, and he has written extensively on the racialised nature of market forces, arguing that such mechanisms are inherently discriminatory.

• To what extent are individuals personally responsible for their success?

Hulmewood refers to important historical and structural inequalities within the education system of the United States that have in explicit ways excluded people of colour from participating in higher education. For example Jim Crow arrangements, and Morril Act provisions (1890) and segregated public education which continued until the mid 20^th century (Brown versus Board of Education – 1954, Higher Education Act – 1965 ).

My own parents’ university education which continued 1964-1968 maps uncomfortably against a comparable experience of an American POC living in the deep south at a similar time. What journey might an POC academic of my age have taken in order to reach the position I have been privileged enough to achieve, and what profound obstacles are they likely to have faced?

What are the existing barriers affecting students of colour, female students, LGBTQ+ youth, working-class students and all of those have not benefited in the ways that people who look like me have? A clear response to this question is the obvious failure of structures of education to fully enable the maximisation of potential of many sectors of the British population – intersectionality must be a key concept with which to unpack such differentials in HE provision and learning attainment.

• What is the justification for some people earning more than others?

“Those who anticipate high income can calculate that a loan repayment is preferable to future higher taxation”. (ibid:11)

From a market perspective, so-called “laws” of supply and demand are “neutral forces” which establish the price of a given good or service.

“Proposals that these structural disadvantages be ameliorated are held to undermine the meritocratic achievement of those who themselves benefit from the absence of a level playing field.” (ibid)

Clearly, the issues being pointed out here, are around the realities of structural inequality which privilege one particular group over another based upon class, race, gender, religion and so forth as derived from colonial histories.

“Meritocracy works differently in a wider system that is oriented towards reducing inequalities in outcomes than it does in one where inequalities are increasing.” (ibid:12)

Evidence show very clearly that this occurs in terms of income, and also within the more limited context of attainment within HE provision. For example see these articles shared with us that, in the first case, illuminates class inequalities in the creative industries (April 2018) and in the second, discusses the ethnicity pay gap (June 2020).

“… in a higher education system that is widening the stratification among institutions BME students are more likely to be recruited to lower status institutions, as well as being more likely to be targeted by for-profit providers.” (ibid: 13)

• What does ‘social solidarity’ mean to you? 

As indicated by Holmwood, social solidarity involves mutual recognition in the maintenance of social rights within a heterogeneous contemporary national and international context (Holmwood 2018:9).

Being part of an activist, antiracist university implies a commitment to an inclusive politics and a significant challenge to the consequences of neoliberal globalisation upon people of colour, the white working working-class, women and LGBTQ+ and non-binary identities.

Holmwood identifies that what is missing is an explanation from those in power about why inclusive politics has not been pursued and instead a socially and environmentally degrading policy of neo-liberal capitalism. (ibid:9)

In a second instance, what this question seems to imply, is a performance of social solidarity with the people with whom I spend the most time in in higher education, namely students. A main area of concern and an arena in which meaningful solidarity should be expressed is in terms of student mental health and well-being, and there is a growing impression that the structures, discourse, paradigm and methods of the UK HE itself might well be exacerbating such well-being issues as experienced by those vulnerable members of the student body. It is also important to express solidarity with those colleagues with whom one is working all of whom are carrying burdens above and beyond what they have been contracted to provide.

One possible implication of the question if it is possible to enable social solidarity and mutual aid within and between course teams and the student body, then collective action might occur to challenge the status quo. To end with the concluding sentences of Holmwood’s paper:

“…insofar as racialised difference and inequality is a product of social structures of disadvantage, those structures will be reproduced in any arrangements that make change a matter of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is the ideology that maintains the status quo, not the means of challenging it.” (ibid:13)