Last week I was invited to talk to the Careers Service at the University of Birmingham about issues of impartiality in careers work. Lots of UK universities, including Birmingham, are currently experiencing encampments protesting the war in Gaza and this set the context for our discussion.
The following is a film made by my son about the encampment at the University of Leicester which provides some insights into how people are feeling and what is going on.
I attended a protest on the University of Leicester campus, where I heard students calling for the University to divest its financial interests in the arms companies that are contributing to the war in Gaza. They also talked angrily about the way in which the same companies are coming onto campus to recruit students and argued that such employers had no place on their campus.
This kind of debate is nothing new, careers services are part of the systems within which they operate and need to build strong relationships with employers. But, if they also make claims to contributing to social justice, the existence of a horrifying war has got to be enough to encourage people to pause and think. We have discussed these issues in relation to the environment in the past, but the current wave of protests shows that this is a multifaceted issue.
One of the problems for those who argue that careers services should stay out of politics, is that student protesters are looking at the actions of careers services (e.g. inviting arms companies onto campus to recruit) and seeing the careers services taking a political side. At the very least, services need to get better at explaining to students what their ideas about impartiality and political neutrality are. But, increasingly I think that the idea of impartiality needs a deeper look.
I wrote an article for the NICEC Journal last year which explored some of these issues and argued that the concept of ‘impartiality’ is straining under a lot of different and often contradictory meanings. Ultimately I make the following point.
I would be in favour of narrowing the terminology of ‘impartiality’ to focus on the careers professionals right to support clients in a way which is independent from the institutional interests of their employer or the funders of their service. I would also argue for some rebalancing of professional ethics away from impartiality and towards transparency, as such an approach seems to me to foster an open and reflexive way of handling issues of partiality.
In other words, just crying ‘impartiality’ is not good enough to get us out of thinking through our position on important issues in which the institutions that we work for and the employers that we work with are entangled. I’m not necessarily saying that every organisation which does something that students, or careers professionals, disagree with should be no platformed, but I am saying that where we encounter moral and political issues that are important to our students and to our wider professional values, we do need to do something. No platforming is one tactic amongst many, there are occasions when it can and should be used, but there are also other tactics that we can use e.g. informing students about these issues, encouraging them to ask critical questions and so on.
These were some of the issues that I was trying to raise at the University of Birmingham. Hopefully they will be of wider interest as well. My presentation follows for those that are interested.
Career guidance for social justice 