ABSTRACT
Few issues are guaranteed to generate as much heat within higher education as that of equal opportunities. Our record of handling equal opportunities has, indeed, not been a good one, but we cannot put this down simply to the controversy associated with the issue – ‘quotas versus targets’, ‘affirmative action versus reverse discrimination’ and so on – even if, for many, it is a totem of political correctness. Truth to tell, our performance has been poor because it has, until recently, been accorded a fairly low priority in the sector. It was not until the turn of the millennium, for example, that all UK universities managed to develop their own individual human resource strategies, and even then only at the insistence of the funding councils in some cases.
