Managing a meritocracy or an equitable organization? Senior managers' views about equal opportunities policies in UK higher education institutions in the context of higher education reformThe paper examines how UK higher education institutions are dealing with the impact of recent UK legislation and European directives on equality in the employment of staff. UK universities have not been to the forefront of organizations blazing the equality trail in the employment field (Northern Ireland is the one exception to this because of the religious sectarian divide there which led to tight legislation in 1989 in the form of the Fair Employment Act). The reluctance of universities to fully engage with equality issues is at least partly because many universities regard themselves as meritocratic institutions in which the most outstanding people achieve success and also because in the UK (as elsewhere in Europe) they have been dealing with the consequences of an audit culture, a managerial and more market driven approach to their work and other complex attempts at reform of their practices and.activities. However, the plethora of legislation and directives coming through in the last few years (eg on 'race', disability, sexual orientation, religion) have meant that higher education has been required to pay more attention to equality concerns in general and also to how it selects, promotes and treats its workforce. In England, the Higher Education Funding Council has required HEIs to develop human resource strategies; here Scotland and Wales have lagged behind somewhat. It is suggested in the paper that the arena of equal opportunities for staff in higher education institutions is an interesting testbed for examining current approaches to managing and governing universities. The concept of fairness in employment and the idea of an equitable higher education institution (for staff and students) do not sit easily with managerial, quasi-market and selective/competitive approaches to the running of higher education but equally neither did most modes of academic self governance such as collegiality, which typically excluded support staff, women and those with a part-time or fixed term academic post. Equality issues for staff may be in tension with other institutional policies (equality mainstreaming as a concept is only slowly gaining ground in the UK) including quality audits of teaching and research, a focus on widening the social basis of higher education participation for students (where student needs may be regarded as taking priority over those of staff) and the selective funding of research. Drawing on a recent Higher Education Funding Council research project involving qualitative case studies of staff experiences of equal opportunities policies in six UK higher education institutions, the paper particularly focuses on illustrative data taken from interviews with senior managers (heads of institutions and their deputies, deans, human resource managers, estates directors and other senior administrative staff). Whilst many respondents were able to talk the language of equality of opportunities with ease, and able to point to initiatives such as staffing targets, action plans and equality policy impact assessment, some of the more recent additions to equality of employment were not as well understood as, for example, the gender and ethnic composition of the workforce. Furthermore some interviewees had little grasp of the conditions of work of some of their staff. We found it was sometimes difficult to reconcile the accounts of equality policies given by senior managers with those provided by some of the other staff in the same institution. The paper suggests that the current climate of managerialism, markets and competition in universities does not fit easily or comfortably with equality issues and that this may have consequences for the equal (or non-equal) treatment of staff in higher education institutions not only in the UK but in other European countries too.