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Have you heard about the crisis on Britain’s university campuses? Free speech is under assault it seems, with students no-platforming guest speakers because they hurt their feelings. Political correctness is absolutely roiling higher education. Students are vandalising curriculums, forcing their teachers to replace white authors with those of colour, demanding trigger warnings ahead of classes on classic works of literature, and calling for safe spaces to be set up to exclude others for no reason other than their racial background or sexuality. You can’t even clap at events any more because student unions think it’s overwhelming for those with PTSD. The solution? Jazz hands, apparently.
It is likely that some of this is already familiar to you, if not in the detail then in the mood music. There is now a mini-industry within the media, often backed up by unquestioning politicians, based on the idea that Britain’s universities are going to the dogs. But let me tell you about another crisis that you probably haven’t heard of. In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the two years preceding. A freedom of information request by the Independent showed a similar rise in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities. Antisemitic or Islamophobic incidents were reported in 26 UK universities. The situation became so dire that the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a public body in England and Wales that promotes and enforces equality and non-discrimination laws in the UK, launched an official inquiry into what seemed to be an epidemic of racism. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks”, outside her bedroom door in her student halls.
In July this year, another freedom of information investigation by the Guardian revealed not only widespread evidence of discrimination in higher education but, according to interviewees, an “absolute resistance to facing the scale of racism in British universities”. Last week, senior staff at Goldsmiths, University of London, supposedly the wokest of Britain’s colleges, said that its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that black and minority ethnic students felt victimised and unsafe.
Incidents tend to receive public attention only when they are circulated on social media. Ayo Olatunji, the black and minority ethnic students’ officer for University College London, told the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every] day in the media if everything that happened went online.” Instead, we hear about other things.
What has cut through is not the widespread racism and the institutional failure to deal with it, but the PC “crisis”, evidence of which is sometimes simply made up. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting that non-white authors be added to the curriculum. Four months later, following precisely zero complaints from fellow students or members of the faculty, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”. This was not true. Not only had Cambridge not dropped any white authors, the open letter did not make any such request in the first place, nor was the featured student the sole signatory. A day after the story ran, the paper issued a correction on page two.
Between 2015 and 2018, the libertarian website Spiked published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which supposedly showed the extent to which censorship is rife on campuses. But writing in Times Higher Education, the University of Surrey’s Carl Thompson called the rankings “misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential”. He found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policies and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law”. That did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted.
This disconnect between reality and the myths circulating about Britain’s universities is not a matter of sloppiness or poor reporting, it is ideological. University campuses have always made the establishment nervous, with student bodies easily able to organise around progressive causes. The targeting of these spaces is an old weapon in the culture wars, one that aims to discredit and discourage challenges to the status quo from the left, and from marginalised groups whose entry into the mainstream happens via higher education.
But students have somehow been vandalising academic freedom since at least the 1960s without bringing about a political coup run by ethnic minorities and queer people. The reality is that universities in the UK remain deeply conservative organisations that not only do not coddle students’ minds, but also fail to protect them against the most basic violations. So I ask you again, have you heard about the real crisis on British campuses?
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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