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This article examines the impact the category of 'whiteness' has on individual interpretations of the American Dream. Via twenty-five life-history interviews, this article presents how US military male Veterans have varying interpretations of the collective idea according to their ethnic and racial background. The evidence presented in this article shows that the idea of the American Dream has racial dimensions or aspects. It suggests that 'whiteness' is taken-for-granted in this symbolic idea. For most ethnic minority respondents, this association between American Dream and 'whiteness' places them in a position to straddle the boundaries of American-ness and Otherness. This has implications in their everyday lives and sense of belonging. This article highlights a wider question regarding the extent 'race' shapes the boundaries of American national identity.

University staff from African, Asian and other Minoritised Groups (AAMG) are not resigned to the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the corridors, classrooms, and lecture theatres of the academy. This article articulates a self-study, where we employ our own narratives and stories, as leaders, teachers, and students on a race-specific initiative. The work presented here attempts to offer a counter-narrative to the colour-evasive discourse and policymaking throughout the English Higher Education sector that perpetuates deficit perspectives for AAMG students. In addition to this, we propose a 'Progressive Relational Pedagogy' that provides a strong foundation for meaningful work across the Higher Education sector. In doing so, we provide a way forward in policy and practice to sustain the cultural richness, heritages, and authenticities of AAMG students. The narrative concludes with pragmatic steps towards enhancing organisational alignment, integration and governance through a race inclusion lens, courtesy of leveraging steps from a Race Inclusion Framework that is underpinned by the LEAD Enterprise Ontology (von Rosing and Laurier, 2015; Caine and von Rosing, 2018).

Higher education is in the grip of an unprecedented level of attention to quantitative performance indicators. The recent trajectory of government policy discourses position such measures as necessary in enabling students to have more and better information to inform their choices, in ensuring that institutions are more transparent in their offer, and in justifying to the public that government funding for higher education is well-spent. Measurement imperatives are, therefore, positioned in policy discourses as key to the generation of market competition and institutional differentiation. But beyond government policymakers, many are sceptical about their use and value. Some consider that the measures themselves are flawed instruments; some are concerned about their role in increasing surveillance of staff; and some feel they have little value in relation to enhancing knowledge and knowing, improving pedagogic relationships and developing learning communities. This chapter uses a narrative approach to explore these tensions. It includes five academics' accounts of their personal responses to measurement imperatives. In tracing how individual narratives intersect with broader discourses of marketisation, equity and differentiation, the chapter activates the sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills, 1959) to bring into closer view some vital questions about the aims, purpose and value of contemporary higher education.