Snowflakes I

The Times, 16th January 2017

Black students 'feel excluded by tutors'

Dominic Kennedy Investigations Editor

Black students are suffering racism because they are expected to ask their lecturers for help and use academic language, according to a students' union.

White staff and students must accept that their behaviour is racist even if that is not the intention, says a report about discrimination at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London.

An excess of white lecturers is creating a racist teaching and learning environment, the students' union claims. SOAS students provoked dismay among some academics last week after it was reported that they were demanding that the "majority of philosophers on our courses" should be from Asia and Africa.

Yesterday the union defended its "Degrees of Racism" report, which blamed prejudice at the school for black and ethnic minority (BME) students getting poorer examination grades than whites. The report identified "barriers to support, including having to ask proactively for help (which excluded students whose confidence had been undermined by racial exclusion and discrimination)".

It stated: "Some BME students felt silenced also by the pressure to communicate using academic language that - for reasons of structural racism - was closer to the everyday speech of middle-class, white students than to their own". When challenged over racism, white students and staff should react constructively "by listening, being non-defensive, and being committed to learning and changing". There should be "a clear message that behaviour and comments are racist because of their impact, not their intention".

The union said that ethnic minority students felt gagged because lecturers failed to challenge the opinions of whites. Tutors "passively enabled white students to dismiss others' experiences by neglecting to intervene".

It added: "Some participants attributed this to their tutors perhaps feeling obliged to maintain what might appear to be freedom of speech. Whether this was the reason or not, the consequence of not intervening was that BME students remained effectively censored."

Daniel Hannan MEP, who was born in Peru and studied at Oxford, said: "Brave anti-racists fought for generations for everyone to be treated the same. It's sad to see some people now fighting to be treated differently."

SOAS said that, while its attainment gap of 10 per cent was less than the average for the sector, it was not complacent and the report had "helped to spark productive debate".

The union said: "Speaking the truth about racial inequality, being unafraid to talk about racism and positively addressing it can only enlighten and benefit our members of every ethnicity."

dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk