Thursday, July 09, 2020





UK: The rise of woke segregationism

Black students don’t need to attend black universities to succeed.

Segregation is back, only this time it’s woke. Incredibly, while most of us look at Apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow-era America with unalloyed horror, today’s radicals see something to emulate. Not so long ago, the idea of a university that took account of race when considering student admissions, academic hires and even the content of the curriculum would have been thought abhorrent in the UK; now just such a plan is backed by the University College Union (UCU) and the National Union of Students.

The idea for a Free Black University is the brainchild of Melz Owusu, soon to be PhD student at the University of Cambridge and former sabbatical officer at the University of Leeds. After launching a GoFundMe campaign Owusu is now calling on universities to ‘redistribute’ money her way. The plan is for an institution focused solely on the needs of black students with a decolonised curriculum taught through online lectures ‘exploring radical and transformational topics’ together with a virtual library of radical readings; a journal and podcast as well as an annual conference for black radical thinkers. All of this is needed, Owusu argues, because existing universities are ‘built on colonisation – the money, buildings, architecture – everything is colonial’. The consequence for black students is that: ‘They fail. They experience racism all the time and the university doesn’t necessarily deal with that in the best way, or deal with it at all.’

But is this true? Jo Grady, the general secretary of UCU, certainly seems to think so. In a damning indictment of her union’s members, she claims black students have to confront ‘a university system that is at best ambivalent towards you, and at worst openly hostile’. It has become widely accepted that BAME students are less likely to gain entry to top universities, more likely to drop out of higher education, and less likely to leave with a good degree. However, none of this stands up to scrutiny.

As Wanjiru Njoya and Doug Stokes point out, according to the 2011 national census, non-white people make up roughly 13 per cent of the UK population. Yet 20 per cent of all students in the UK are from BAME communities. Among league table-topping Russell Group universities, this figure rises to 21.6 per cent. There hardly seems to be a colour bar on students entering higher education.

So what about academic achievement? In 2017/18, 29 per cent of white students came away with first-class degrees compared to only 13.5 per cent of black students: apparently clear evidence of an ethnic attainment gap. But look more closely: 21 per cent of Asian and 25 per cent of mixed-race students also got firsts. And when we move down a rung the gap narrows considerably: 47 per cent of white students got a 2.1 degree compared to 42 per cent of black students, 44 per cent of Asian and 49 per cent of mixed-race students. Take into account factors such as the type of university attended, prior attainment, subject choice and parental income and even this tiny ethnic attainment gap becomes non-existent.

So, are BAME students who perform well at university beating the odds while battling constant racist abuse? According to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in the three-and-a-half years up to January 2019, universities received an average of just 2.3 complaints of racial harassment from staff and 3.6 from students. This equates to 0.006 per cent of students and 0.05 per cent of staff lodging complaints. Which is hardly surprising. British universities must be among the most liberal and least racist places on Earth. At the last election, over 80 per cent of staff expressed their intention to vote for either Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party. Hotbeds of right-wing nationalism they are not. Inclusion and diversity workshops, awareness-raising programmes, decolonisation training and unconscious-bias testing abound.

Yet Owusu claims a Free Black University is needed because, ‘we hear from black students all the time that they leave university traumatised’. In response, she proposes a ‘members’ space for black academics who need support’ as well as ‘a space of community and care for black students, connecting them with black therapists, counsellors and community healers to offer a range of support’. It’s almost as if the more universities do to raise awareness of racism, decolonise everything and challenge all perceived microaggressions, the more some black students experience higher education as traumatic.

Sadly, segregation has become fashionable. It was back in 2016 that students first called for LGBT-only halls of residence on campus. US universities increasingly offer living and recreational facilities solely for the use of black students. Defenders often nod to the highly successful historically black universities in the US. But these universities were established out of necessity at a time when black people were prohibited from attending most colleges. Today’s calls for segregation are less a demand for equality and more an expansion of the campus safe space.

Those backing the Free Black University wrongly assume that black students need black tutors, black classmates and a black curriculum in order to succeed. This insults the many black students who have not only succeeded in higher education, but who have also gone on to make significant contributions to global scholarship. The word ‘university’ comes from the Latin ‘universitas’ meaning ‘the whole, total, the world’ – at best, universities should offer access to humanity’s collective knowledge to all who want to pursue it, irrespective of their skin colour. We can’t let woke segregationists disrupt this aspiration.

SOURCE 




The danger of ‘decolonising’ education

A curriculum should enrich and challenge young minds, not indoctrinate them.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the movement to ‘decolonise’ university education has picked up pace. Activists are calling for course curricula to be revised and made more representative, and for the differences in the attainment of BAME students to be addressed.

Those in charge of Britain’s elite universities are clearly worried. Hence vice chancellors have been falling over themselves to wear their universities’ anti-racist credentials on their sleeves. Oxford University has already published an open letter urging black students who feel traumatised by the killing of George Floyd to apply for a reduction in workload and special consideration in their exams. Meanwhile, a statement from King’s College London declares that ‘Racism and racial discrimination have no place at King’s’. Neither, it seems, does the truth.

In truth (and this matters) BAME participation in universities has been increasing in recent years. In 2018, the BBC reported that BAME students are actually ‘punching above their weight when it comes to representation at university’. For example, it revealed that while black people account for about four per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds in England and Wales, black students ‘make up eight per cent of the UK university population’. Or take Oxford University specifically. It revealed that more than 22 per cent of undergraduate students starting in 2019 were Britons from BAME backgrounds – up from 18 per cent on the previous year’s UCAS admissions statistics.

With admissions data refuting the idea that universities are institutionally racist, campaigners have focused on racial differentials between those getting first- and second-class degrees. Figures for 2019 show that despite the huge increase in the number of BAME students over the past decade, 71 per cent of Asian students and just 57 per cent of black students gained an upper second or first in their undergraduate degree, compared with 81 per cent of white students.

But a more compelling explanation for the discrepancy than simply shouting ‘institutional racism’ would require looking at a range of other variables. These could include such factors as socio-economic status and prior educational experience, and internal factors such as family attitudes to education and informal forms of support. This is a more painstaking and difficult process, and it is likely to yield a more complex account of degree outcomes. But it would also provide an account that could yield some proper recommendations.

Sadly, such an attempt to understand the reasons for racially discrepant degree outcomes seems beyond campaigners. Instead, they seem to think that the main problem is that BAME people do not see themselves represented in the UK education system in general, from the national curriculum to the literary canon. As the group Black Curriculum put it in a letter to UK education secretary Gavin Williamson, black people need to see themselves, as black people, in what they read in the curriculum. ‘Learning black history should not be a choice but should be mandatory’, the letter reads. ‘Our curriculum should not be reinforcing the message that a sizeable part of the British population are not valued.’ The claim here seems to be that if a member of a racially defined group does not see his or her group’s experience reflected in the curriculum, he or she will feel devalued or psychologically harmed in some way.

The problem with this view is that it endorses a reductive and deterministic model of both education and identity-formation. Indeed, the metaphor of education as a mirror in which you expect to see your racial group’s experience reflected back to you, common in decolonising discourses, fundamentally confuses education with more therapeutic practices. Because, at its best, education is not about therapy. It is about expanding and deepening pupils’ capacities to become more autonomous thinkers, able to make better judgments for themselves. This process is not always comforting or comfortable. But when approached in good faith on all sides, it can be transformative at the level of the individual pupil.

Through the educational transactions between teacher and pupil, greater self-consciousness can be achieved. A pupil can develop a sense of individuality, as someone who knows and thinks for himself. Advocates of decolonising education are actually rejecting this richer concept of self-identity for a weaker understanding of identity, in which one simply sees oneself as part of a racial group.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t consider revising the school curriculum. We should, but not solely or mainly in response to political pressure. That’s because responding in this way is nearly always bad for education. For example, in the wake of the riots in the UK in the early 1980s, the government commissioned the 1985 Swann Report. It advocated anti-racist training in order to weed out unconscious bias, and attempted to introduce new educational content on the basis of ethnicity alone. Why not, the report suggested, use Hindu Rangoli patterns when teaching geometry in maths? How this would help a pupil understand either geometry or Hinduism remains unclear to this day. And more recent attempts to diversify the English literature GCSE course in response to political pressure have resulted in books being included that, in the words of Bennie Kara, a headteacher and founder of Colouring in the Curriculum, ‘lack imagination and scope as texts . . . where’s the challenge?’.

And therein lies the problem. In a ‘decolonised’ education system, in which every approved identity group is to see itself, there will be even less to challenge individual pupils intellectually, irrespective of their ethnicity.

A curriculum should enrich and challenge young minds, not indoctrinate them. So review curricula by all means, but we cannot let the process be dominated by activists, whose aims are not primarily educational.

If vice chancellors have anything to apologise for, it should be for their inability to stand up for education and knowledge. The principles that determine curriculum changes are important. But if those principles are purely political, be they from the left or from the right, then they are unlikely to create a better education system. And that is what we all want: a better, rather than decolonised, education.

SOURCE 






Campus kangaroo courts in Australia

Bettina Arndt

I am still up to my ears working to expose the most grievous example of unfair administrative decision-making in relation to sexual misconduct – through my ongoing investigation of our campus kangaroo courts.

Over the past few months my diligent volunteers have done a great job sending letters, firstly to Vice Chancellors and more recently to university boards, asking questions about how they are tackling the issue of investigating and adjudicating sexual assault on campus – particularly in the light of Dan Tehan’s instruction, via TEQSA, that universities should get out of this territory.

Many have passed on to me the glowing letters they have received in response, as the university administrators claim all is hunky dory, with accused young men being offered procedural fairness and having all their rights protected. That’s so much hogwash.

Over recent weeks I have talked to the parents of a final year student who had his degree withheld for over a year after a sexual assault allegation. Despite no proper investigation, his accuser’s degree was promptly awarded while his life was in limbo.

Another student was excluded from all university premises after being caught with a drunken girl who’d partially undressed him. Then there was the mother whose student son now faces criminal charges even though his accuser admits she thought she was having sex with another student. At a fourth university, a young man is being humiliated by accusations of sexual assault and harassment being circulated on social media by his ex-girlfriend. This is the same university which has suspended male students for singing bawdy songs at a college event. 

Across the board our universities are selling out young men through administrative decision-making which denies them proper justice. With the lawyers and researchers helping with this project, I’m putting together documentation to show how few of our universities allow access to lawyers to protect the accused during the secretive investigations being conducted on our campuses. How very few allow proper examination of the evidence, let alone opportunity for cross-examination.

 Unlike our criminal courts, none of this administrative decision-making has proper oversight. The decisions to steal these young men’s degrees, derail their careers, shame and humiliate them are made by unnamed people, behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny.

newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au


No comments: