Emulating corporate business, HE institutions across the world have for many years published individual mission and values statements. Almost without fail these have included positive statements about culture, diversity and equality on their campuses and in their teaching and learning environments. One might argue whether these are aspirations, guiding principles or even claims of a factual nature, but what cannot be argued is the almost overwhelming research evidence of pervasive separation, in effect segregation, amongst students studying in diverse cohorts on heterogeneous HE campuses. Most commonly separation/ segregation occurs along the lines of nationality, language, class and/or culture. In the case of India one would should caste and gender to the list of possible divisions.
This paper explores the gap between mission/ values statements and student experiences on three English and two Indian urban, HE Campuses, using data gathered from a UKIERI funded (UK-India Education and Research Initiative) project focussed on widening participation which, over the past 3 years, sought to:
- explore the nature of social cohesion, integration, diversity, equality and discrimination experienced by disadvantaged and under-represented groups in HE,
- understand, challenge and support change in the separate or parallel HE experiences of different students,
- enhance the process of truly learning with and from peers,
- identify socially and academically-focused strategies that might be adopted to enhance integration and social-cohesion amongst HE students and staff.
The UKIERI research, and the data it generated, is based within a social constructivist/ social realist perspective (Young, 2008; Moore, 2000), wherein human agency in knowledge production is acknowledged (Durkheim, 1964), alongside patterns and tendencies that stretch beyond unique context dependent individual experiences. This perspective enables the development of improvedunderstanding of HE social and educational contexts that significantly shape and frame (but do notdetermine, especially at the individual level) participants actions, expectations and experiences in regard to campus-based diversity and social cohesion, be it those of students or their institutional managers. It is the findings from the analysis of these data that facilitates exploration of the impact (or not) of generalised HE mission/ values statements regarding diversity and social cohesion in HE.
