Don't Divide Us

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The myth of Britain’s racist universities

The idea has taken hold that British universities are in urgent need of radical reform to overturn entrenched racial discrimination. I don’t buy it, says Philip Hammond.

This view of the education system — largely promulgated by universities themselves — is now widely being acted on, via new staff training programmes and moves to decolonise curricula. Probably many colleagues feel that such initiatives are basically well-intentioned and designed to further a good cause — that of anti-racism. But current policies, and the underpinning claim that universities suffer from systemic racism, reflect a new understanding of racism that bears little resemblance to how most people understand the problem. Today’s approach, grounded in Critical Race Theory, promotes division, shuts down debate, and ignores key drivers of inequality.

 

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Open letter to UCU members and conference delegates

We are members of the University and College Union (UCU). Some of us have been active in organising in branches, including in past industrial disputes. The following reflects strong disagreements we have with the orientation of our union, manifest in the current motions that have been proposed to our Congress and sector conferences to be held on 28–30 October 2020.

It is essential that universities remain places where academics can pursue their research and teaching freely, without censure or policing on the basis of the political and ideological commitments of others. Students, too, should not feel that ideas they have or positions they hold should not be articulated or up for debate. We, and UCU, have long supported this in relation to pressure from our government, funders and from other governments. Academic freedom should be sacrosanct. We note that motions submitted to the conference around Prevent and the surveillance of overseas students are progressive in this regard.

However, we note a trend in recent years for our union to take positions that encourage our employers and academic departments  to formalise  certain political positions as those of the institution / department, and therefore to place research, teaching and indeed individual academics and students associated with other  views in an invidious position.

At the upcoming conference, motions submitted to the union include the following statements:

  • Conference believes that members in further, higher, adult and prison education must fully support the BLM movement and that UCU branches must play an active role in delivering an anti-racist workplace.
  • Conference resolves to consider and implement a plan of action, including if necessary the use of industrial action if the above calls  [for decolonising the curriculum and our institutions] are not heeded.
  • Congress resolves to dismantle the exclusivity of cis and hetero normativities in all UCU work; to develop branch action plans challenging the use of academic freedom arguments against LGBT+ people
  • Congress rejects attempts to cloak anti-trans campaigning and views with spurious ‘free speech’ or academic freedom arguments.

Many employers have embraced elements of critical race theory, decoloniality and ‘white privilege’, and some have openly endorsed these as university values. One university VC proposed compulsory ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white privilege’ training for all staff and students. Universities have also formally adopted the Stonewall Charter, which takes a particular view on gender and sex at odds with that of many members of UCU and the public.

So the trend in UCU, and also amongst senior management teams and VCs, is to adopt particular political positions as values for the institution. The academic freedom of staff who do not hold these values is compromised by their formal adoption by their employers. This is especially important in Universities, given their role as crucibles of knowledge creation and critical thought.

Academic freedom and freedom of speech are vital precisely because they enable individuals – staff and students – to develop knowledge and pursue truth as they see it, not as others would have them see it. These principles guarantee the ability of individuals holding views supportive of BLM, critical race theory, decolonisation and many other views to research and teach without the threat of censure. Equally they guarantee the same for contrary views.   They are values that we defend regardless of wider political affiliations.

As a union, our role should be to defend members’ jobs and conditions. Yet those supporting the motions encouraging institutions to formally adopt certain positions  should be explicit as to whether they would defend a staff member who spoke against BLM, insisted that they did not intend to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ on their course, openly held ‘gender-critical’ views, or opposed no platforming and supported freedom of speech for any of these views. These are important questions for trade unionists in the light of the motions being discussed at congress. Given recent events in France, would UCU defend a lecturer who in the context of their teaching showed cartoons that offended religious sensibilities?

We call on UCU conference attendees, and members generally, to reflect on the damaging impact of these motions, and other positions and statements from our union, on academic freedom and freedom of speech. We do not see the role of the union as encouraging employers to police the views of union members, or indeed, doing so itself. This development compromises  UCU’s capacity to defend lecturers’ academic freedom, freedom of speech and thought on campus, and potentially in individual cases  lecturers’ jobs too.

DDU academics

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On Freedom Of Speech and The Culture Of Offence

Like others before him, in France and elsewhere, Samuel Paty was murdered because he offended. Nico Macdonald at medium.com argues we need to be free to offend and that well-intentioned attempts to protect certain ethnic or religious groups from the feeling of being offended, results in an infantilisation that can be profoundly destructive for everyone:

The inability of some, particularly former liberals, to criticise behaviour by people from particular religious or cultural groupings — and to claim offence on their behalf — may seem like a modern expression of anti-racism and an attempt not to ‘fuel the racists’ fire’. But the reality is that their attitude infantilises the people in their groupings. It imagines they are not capable of achieving the moral standards of our society, in the same way that Europeans regarded ‘the native’ during periods of their colonisations. It is ‘othering’. You cannot defeat racism by racialising society.

 

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On The Importance Of The Right To Offend

Kenan Malik at the New Humanist argues that the right to offend is necessary for social progress and that those lacking power need freedom of speech more than the powerful themselves. Written in 2014, in the wake of last week’s murder of teacher, Samuel Paty, for having given offence, Malik’s words are more important than ever:

 

The notion of giving offence suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, or caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. This is why free speech is essential not simply to the practice of democracy, but to the aspirations of those groups who may have been failed by the formal democratic processes; to those whose voices may have been silenced by racism, for instance. The real value of free speech, in other words, is not to those who possess power, but to those who want to challenge them. And the real value of censorship is to those who do not wish their authority to be challenged. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect’, we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.

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How We Bend The Knee To Our HR Overlords

Aris Roussinos at Unherd draws on the ideas of Louis Althusser to illuminate how the radical rhetoric of contemporary self-styled anti-racism morphs into a successor ideology. Far from toppling capitalism, it  is proving popular with many HR departments and a good friend to a new liberal élite:

Like the wave of statue-toppling earlier this summer, which immediately subsumed itself into the endless bureaucracy of commissions and panels, overseen by the quangos and opaquely-funded NGOs which actually run this country, we realise that true power in Britain rests neither in the streets nor at the ballot box, but in the hands of the professional managerial class. The spread of the successor ideology is not, despite the urban violence which occasionally attends its spread, a revolutionary moment, but the very opposite, a counterrevolution of HR managers, the means by which managerial liberalism reasserts its authority over the organs of the state.

 

 

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https://unherd.com/2020/09/why-woke-is-the-ruling-ideology/

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Unconscious Bias Training Is Divisive Nonsense

Many public and private institutions and workplaces are turning to alleged anti-racist training materials and providers that endorse the idea of unconscious bias, which is itself based on a scientifically discredited concept of implicit association tests. The result, argues Carrie Clark at Spiked Online, can only be more resentment:

The test seemed to show that vast swathes of people were still ‘unconsciously’ racist, in spite of the dramatic decline in racist attitudes over the past 25 years.

The diversity industry has grown to be hugely profitable. It is now worth a cool $8 billion a year in the United States. Assisted by the IAT’s veneer of scientific respectability, unconscious-bias training has been marketed as an essential tool for any business serious about addressing racial inequality.

But reams and reams of research have discredited the IAT, undermining the entire premise of unconscious-bias training in the process. Time and again, meta-analysis has failed to find a correlation between a person’s score on the IAT and how discriminatory their behaviour is.

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https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/28/unconscious-bias-training-is-divisive-nonsense/

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The N-Word Is Repellent-But So Is The Belief White People Are Innately Racist

Following a mass of complaints, and predictable subsequent apologies this summer when BBC presenter Fiona Lamdin used the N word, at the request of victim K-Dogg’s family that the BBC report in full the racist language of the attackers, Calvin Robinson at The Mail Online argues that while the pusillanimous apologies were not needed, the BBC do need to get their own house in order and stop its own segregation by channels:

There is another worrying factor: the ‘ghettoisation of radio’ at the BBC. If you compare the regular line-ups of presenters for Radio 1 and those working for 1Xtra, you’ll note that there is a significant separation of race and culture.

Radio 1 features a majority of white faces, from Nick Grimshaw to Greg James, while 1Xtra is mostly hosted by people of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic background.

This is a disgraceful example of institutional racial categorisation, particularly when the BBC is spending £100 million on diversity and inclusion.

Radio 1 is targeted at 15 to 29-year-olds, broadcasting popular music of the day. And since the majority of this is black music, there is no reason for the majority of these hosts to be white when the BBC has so many black DJs on staff.

Certainly, it’s time the BBC put its house in order. For it was wrong to make an apology for correctly and responsibly reporting details of a horrendous racist crime that took place on our streets.

What the Corporation should instead be apologising for is the shocking segregation on its radio channels, and the hypocrisy of encouraging gang culture when it suits its own purposes, but then playing high and mighty when it does not.

 

 

 

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8631531/CALVIN-ROBINSON-N-word-repellent-belief-white-people-innately-racist.html

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What Maya Angelou Means When She Says ‘Shakespeare Must Be A Black Girl’

 
Karen Swallow Prior at The Atlantic makes a compelling case that great literature can deal well with both what is unique and universal about the lives of us all as individuals – when it comes to art, we don’t need to ‘stay in our lanes’:

In the women’s literature class I’m teaching this semester—in which we are reading Angelou, along with Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Charlotte Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and many more female authors—we are emphasizing the distinctive qualities of women’s literature. We are marking what these authors bring to bear on the human condition, the tensions their writing reveals between public and private, personal and political, and the ways in which women’s writing speaks to experiences at variance with those of the male writers in the traditional canon.

But Angelou’s message was that there is more in poetry—and, by extension, all art—that unites than divides us. Not only can a long-dead, uber-white male writer like Shakespeare voice an experience so universal that it speaks truth to power for a poor black girl living in the Jim Crow American South, but that same girl can reflect years later on how the poetry of her beloved Edgar Allen Poe reads “like it was written by LL Cool J.”

 
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https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/what-maya-angelou-means-when-she-says-shakespeare-must-be-a-black-girl/272667/

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We’ve Learned So Much From Dead White Men – Trying To Remove Them From History Is Madness

It’s often claimed that accepting or conforming to Western canonical standards necessarily means non-white people have to pay too high a cultural price and swap authentic ethnic identity for inauthentic something artificial and inauthentic. Lindsay Johns at ibtimes disagrees and argues the case for the universality of great literary works:

To see books or bodies of knowledge as exclusively white, black, male or straight is to spectacularly miss the point. It is first and foremost human knowledge. Moreover, the bigger issue at stake here – and why its composition is always so contentious and highly politicised – is the way in which the canon has been used throughout history to serve as an intellectual justification for the abuse of power, backed up by spurious claims of racial supremacy, which has often resulted in appalling malfeasance.

Given that whoever controls the canon has a monopoly on power, we must be mindful of the ramifications of that for people of colour. In so doing, please let’s put pay once and for all to the nefarious lie that has been propagated for centuries to such brutal and dehumanising effect – that white has the monopoly on the cerebral, whilst black is solely physical.

Proud as I am of my black South African heritage, my principal allegiance is to the only race which is not a social construct – the human race. For this reason, the Latin playwright Terence (himself an African slave from Carthage) is my hero and his famous dictum the most eloquent and incisive antidote to this PC imbecility: “I am a human being and I consider nothing human alien to me.”

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https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/weve-learned-so-much-dead-white-men-trying-remove-them-history-madness-1587140

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Not All The Facts Fit The Anti-Colonialist Narrative

There have been understandable pressures on African anti-colonialists that have led to a narrative equally reductive and simplistic, if not as morally egregious, as the colonial justifications for ‘civilising the savages’.  But history is nothing if not complex and nuanced argues Remi Adekoya at Unherd:

Yet in an interview a few years after independence, the same Achebe who had highlighted colonialism’s disruptive nature stated: “I am not one of those who would say Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period…this is ridiculous – we have gained a lot. But unfortunately, when two cultures meet . . . what happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added.”

Intellectuals such as Achebe clearly recognised the identity crisis colonialism triggered. They also knew about British atrocities such as the looting and destruction of the ancient Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, among others. Yet on the other hand, Achebe believed that Africa benefited from the introduction of Western education, technology and medicine, as well as liberal European ideals such as “democracy” and “equality”, which had not necessarily been popular beforehand.

Read more here
https://unherd.com/2020/08/anti-colonialists-must-tell-the-truth-about-empire/