I compared universities to slave plantations to disturb, not discourage

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/24/universities-slave-plantations-racist

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“Universities like ‘slave plantations’” was the headline the Sunday Times gave to its article covering a talk I gave recently at Goldsmiths University in London. It is a strange sensation to see your words in print, particularly so when those words are out of order and context therefore altering the meaning. The headline suggests I was somehow comparing the experiences of the enslaved to those of staff and students on campus. That would have been not only absurd but also offensive, considering the history of unspeakable horror of the transatlantic slave trade. The metaphor of the plantation was not used to explore the experiences in the university but the regressive role it plays in society.

As places of critical thought, universities have the allure of being incubators for progressive ideals. Student movements and academic developments such as feminism and black studies play into this mythical notion. The reality is, however, that until the 1960s, less than 5% of the population went to university and they were bastions of white, male privilege. In the 18th century, the botanist Carl Linnaeus, in his System Naturae, outlined the hierarchy of being, with Europaeus Albus (white) at the top and Afer Niger (black), firmly at the bottom. It is no coincidence that he has a university in Sweden named after him. My colleague Nathaniel Coleman highlighted the role of Francis Galton at UCL promoting the eugenics movement; and racial “science” was a key Nazi justification for the Holocaust. Deepa Naik perfectly summed up the universities’ role in society when she argued at last year’s NUS black students’ conference that “the university is not racist, it is racism”.

The reason I invoked Audre Lorde’s metaphor of the university as the “master’s house” was as a challenge to academics. We cannot assume that just because the student body has become more diverse since the 60s that the role of universities has changed. Other presenters on the day highlighted the inequalities present in universities: from staff experiences of being ignored or mistaken for the cleaner, to prospective ethnic minority students being warned off applying to elite universities because they would not fit in.

The exclusionary curriculum, bought to the fore by the student-led campaign “Why is my curriculum white?” also featured prominently in the day. If we understand the university as the master’s house, then the institutional racism embedded in universities does not come as a surprise. If the university is racism, then of course the experience within it will be exclusionary.

For an academic concerned with overcoming racial inequality, this poses a very serious challenge. In class when I taught these concepts, one of my students diagnosed my role as that of the “overseer”, maintaining the system of racial oppression. This jarring metaphor serves as a reminder of the institutional role of universities, which I can do little to alter. The inequalities in the school system affect who achieves the grades to attend; students who do make the grade are charged £9,000 a year and the government just replaced maintenance grants for the poorest students with loans. Universities assign credentials to graduates that justify their place in the social order; however, the likelihood of achieving the “best” degree, from the “top” institutions is too heavily influenced by class and race to even resemble a meritocracy. Instead, the result is a system that reproduces the inequalities in society.

The nature of academia is that career advancement is achieved by attending conferences and writing papers for other academics, creating a self-referential bubble where our critical knowledge gets trapped within the university. The separation of thought from action, of university from the social world, is a key way that inequalities are maintained. The academic industrial complex creates institutional forms as real and discriminatory as those that exist in the police force, which we are quick to condemn. If the university is the master house, then we are among the tools that maintain the edifice.

The bleak metaphor of the plantation was not meant to discourage but to disturb, in the hope of rethinking our roles in universities. Our aim cannot just be to get a better representation of students and staff on campus; we need to change the nature of what we do. Even with increasing neoliberalisation, universities remain places where academics maintain the autonomy of a profession. Our research agendas are not (necessarily) dictated to us, we have some control over our time and flexibility (within boundaries) about what we teach. As such we occupy an incredibly privileged position. We can organically engage with social movements off campus, and gear our work towards improving the social conditions that we so eloquently describe. This is the main reason we started the black studies movement in Britain – because we are committed to using university for social change. But doing so means recognising our privilege; the regressive role that universities continue to play in society, and the institutional barriers we must overcome.