Building the anti-racist university: next steps

volume.The 2013 conference 'Building the Anti-racist University: Next Steps' was focused on looking forward to what needed to be done now in the 21 st century drawing on 20 th /21 st century experience of institutional gains followed by their attrition in some cases and fundamental institutional inertia in others.Both of these responses to addressing institutional racism worked against organizational change even as equality and diversity policies aimed at changing the face of universities were instituted.The papers in this special issue are the results of the thinking instantiated by the call for papers and the transdisciplinary, transnational theoretical and practice based discussions at the conference on experiences of institutional racial equality change processes and strategies as both partial successes and abject failures.We take both successes and failures forward as lessons learned into the new arena for anti-racist work in which we find ourselves, the neo-liberal, 'post-race' university which by and large still caters for national/ international elites, where some knowledge is commodified on a global scale and others continue to be erased.What is distinctive about this special issue is the international character of the collection demonstrating common political concerns globally about racism in higher education.Yet there remain some puzzling absencesno contribution from mainland Europe, the Caribbean or Australia and New Zealand for example.