Introduction

Brands, marketing and communications across universities have become increasingly competitive to engage national and international audiences to come to study at a UK university (Bamberger, BronshteinYemini, 2020). UK universities are under pressure to continuously have a clear brand narrative and corporate visual identities, with a view to striving to be agile, modernised, global and relevant (Mogaji, 2018). However, the identities of some universities are masked behind racist and colonial histories (Gabriel & Tate, 2017). This chapter provides an outline for how universities can meaningfully disrupt their brand to start becoming anti-racist. Universities typically develop their brand around their location, courses, student experience, credibility and career outcomes (Mogaji & Yoon, 2019), but neglect equity and EDI as part of the brand, marketing and communication guiding principles.

Universities’ identities are intrinsically connected to the White structures of colonialism (Doku, 2019) and radicalisation (Law, 2016). It is not possible to dismantle structural racism in a university without recognising its links to White privilege and its impact on the oppression of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people in the UK university system. Law (2016) outlines several issues that disarm universities from addressing their colonial and antiracism as a foundational intellectual project; narrowing the debate concerning race and HE; deprioritising the anti-racist good practice model in institutional identities; marginalising debates about race in HE; and overlooking cross-sectoral and cross-national learning. Disinvestment from addressing these in an HE institution’s brand narrative, identity, communication and marketing can exacerbate the dearth of diversity and inclusion in university spaces.

Some of these themes are conveyed in universities’ professional services where ‘the use of images of racialised staff in university promotional material also attracted comment. Institutions could use them as positive messages that show the institution is not a ‘White’ enclave. Conversely, using such images could be viewed as tokenistic or perfunctory when the images do not match the real university environment. Mirza (2017) repeatedly requested that her photo be removed from college brochures, arguing that ‘[v] isual images of “colourful” happy faces are used to show how the university has embraced the difference’ (Mahony & Weiner, 2020, p 850).