Abstract:

Racism remains one of the most persistent and structurally embedded forms of inequality, shaping access to employment, education, health, and fundamental rights. It operates not only through overt discrimination but also through institutional arrangements, everyday practices, and subtle microaggressions that cumulatively affect the life trajectories of millions of people. Despite decades of research and policy attention, racism continues to reproduce itself across generations and social systems.

Education plays a central but often underexamined role in this process. Historically, educational systems have functioned as sites where social hierarchies are reproduced rather than neutralized. Critical race scholarship has demonstrated that curricula, pedagogical practices, and institutional structures have frequently privileged Eurocentric norms while marginalizing other epistemologies, experiences, and identities. These dynamics have contributed to unequal educational outcomes through mechanisms such as segregation, biased assessment practices, and unequal access to academic resources.

While racism in lower-level education has been extensively studied, its presence in European higher education has received comparatively limited attention. The current paper addresses an important gap by examining how racism is currently addressed through policies and programs within higher education, with particular attention to both institutional responses and pedagogical practices.

To achieve the objective, the following approach was adopted: Firstly, a desk review of both academic literature and institutional documentation related to racism, anti-discrimination, and inclusive education in higher education settings was performed. To complement this qualitative analysis, Natural Language Processing techniques were applied to the collected set of policy and program texts.

The results illustrate that while higher education institutions employ different approaches to address racism, they remain fragmented. The combination of qualitative interpretation and computational analysis provided a more comprehensive picture of existing practices and highlighted areas where institutional strategies could be better operationalized to become more effective.

Keywords:

Racism, Higher Education, Educational Policy, Text Analysis.