Growing numbers of black academics quitting for private sector

The bias in recruitment and progression in HE is horrendous, not just on racial or gender grounds, but with senior managers recruiting colleagues from their previous institutions blocking avenues of promotion for existing staff. With the constant erosion of pay and the worsening of conditions, its a wonder many more staff haven't left for much more lucrative salaries in the private sector,

Indeed. It is 'who you know', not 'what you know' in the recruitment and progression at universities. Sad state of affairs.

It does also need to be remembered that there aren't that many opportunities for promotion on academic routes in the first place. The vast majority of academic staff in UK universities end up at senior lecturer level and sit at that ceiling for decades. And as much as universities do indeed add-on senior management non-academic jobs to place some academic staff (and thus an area minority colleagues are genuinely missing out on in many places), universities also can't just keep spending money they don't have by promoting academic staff to professorial posts for the sake of esteem or "doing really good work". There simply aren't enough specialist roles for academic staff in universities to have viable promotion routes. Most roles an academic does beyond the standard expectation of teaching and research that would consider promotion and a slightly higher salary in most sectors are simply freely done bolt-ons to the basic job in HE; module leader, course leader, champion, coordinator, pathway lead etc. So I can see why black academics are leaving - the filter from standard academic narrows pretty fast pretty early, reducing opportunities and highlighting the mechanisms of promotion selection suggested in the article