What This Moment Must Teach Us
A statement from ISCRE on merit, scrutiny and institutional accountability
A recent, painful episode involving a Black academic’s career and his subsequent death has opened up a much wider public argument about equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and about merit. We will not comment on the individual circumstances; they are for his family and the institutions involved, and they deserve to be treated with more care than they have so far been given by many. What concerns ISCRE is different and will outlast this particular news cycle: the questions this episode has forced into the open about how institutions scrutinise people, how they define and defend merit, and who is held accountable when things go wrong.
For those of us who have spent decades campaigning for racial equality, this is not a comfortable moment. But discomfort is not a reason to look away. It is usually a sign that something important is being tested.
Scrutiny is not the enemy of equality
ISCRE has always argued for transparent recruitment, properly verified qualifications, clear promotion criteria and genuine accountability. Nobody should be shielded from legitimate scrutiny because of their race, and nobody should assume that a challenge to someone’s record is itself an act of racism. Institutions that avoid difficult scrutiny in the name of inclusion are not practising equality; they are postponing a reckoning, and they are doing no favours to the people they claim to be protecting.
But scrutiny has to be scrutinised too
The harder question is whether scrutiny is applied evenly. If a candidate from a minority background must be demonstrably exceptional before an appointment feels safe, while an equivalent candidate from the majority is simply judged to be good enough, that is not rigour. It is a second, hidden bar. The same applies once someone is in post: the intensity, tone and duration of scrutiny a person attracts once questions are raised should not depend on who they are, or on the public appetite for a particular kind of story.
An institution that cannot see this difference is not being neutral. It is choosing not to look.
The answer is not less EDI. It is better EDI
None of this is an argument for retreating from equality work. It is an argument for doing it with more honesty. Representation alone is not transformation. A photograph of a diverse leadership team tells us nothing about whether the barriers beneath it have actually been removed, or whether the people in that photograph have the same support, patience and margin for error as everyone else around them.
The equality movement, ISCRE included, has sometimes leaned too heavily on visible appointments and not heavily enough on the unglamorous work underneath them: verification, mentoring, fair process, and the pipeline of opportunity that makes an appointment sustainable rather than symbolic. That is part of what our own Beyond Boundaries programme, and our work in policing, prisons, education and health, is built to address. We do not assume every disparity is evidence of discrimination, and we do not assume every appointment is evidence of progress. We try to establish what is actually true, and act on that.
What institutional accountability actually requires
The uncomfortable truth this episode points to is that many institutions only discover the strength of their processes after a controversy has already broken, when the incentive is to manage reputational damage rather than to establish what happened. Real accountability has to be built in earlier than that: rigorous, consistent verification at the point of appointment, applied to everyone; clear and proportionate routes for raising and investigating concerns; and a recognised duty of care towards anyone facing sustained public scrutiny, whatever the eventual findings turn out to be. An institution that only performs due diligence in public, under pressure, has already failed the people it is judging, in both directions.
Accountability also has to include institutions asking harder questions about their own conduct: why concerns were or were not raised earlier, who benefited from a high-profile appointment and who took the risk, and what duty of care was owed once that person became the subject of public scrutiny. An institution that outsources all of the risk to the individual it appointed, while claiming all of the credit while things were going well, has not been accountable. It has been convenient.
Reclaiming merit
Your race should neither open the door for you nor close it against you. The door should be open, the rules should be clear, the assessment should be rigorous and consistently applied, and the institution should stand behind its own processes once a decision has been made, rather than abandoning them at the first sign of pressure.
That is the case for merit ISCRE is prepared to defend, and it is also the case for equality. The two are not in tension. Merit is not threatened by equality of opportunity; it is threatened when opportunity, scrutiny and support are unequal. Genuine equality was never about lowering the bar. It is about the much harder work of making sure everyone who reaches it was judged, supported and held to account by the same standard.
Issued by ISCRE