News
Racism in Academia
(November 10, 2012)A new campaign has just been launched in the UK against the racial exclusion of black academics and professors from equal job opportunities at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The petition at Change.org has already been signed by prominent academics, poets, filmmakers, writers, and others from all walks of life and from different parts of the world, including the USA.
Oxford and Cambridge are being accused of systematically and racially excluding black academics from equal job opportunities through institutional racism and a process of selection which favours candidates with similar characteristics to the existing white dominated academic staff. Oxford and Cambridge have only a very small handful of full-time black academics, only at lower levels. As the oldest universities they should be leading by example. Meanwhile, a large number of British black academics are working in senior positions at America's elite universities. According to a study published last year, there are about 14,000 British professors in the whole of the UK but only approximately 75 are black. There is no shortage of black PhD graduates but most of them have had to go into intellectual exile in the USA, Canada, and other countries escaping what they see as the institutional racism that still exists at the heart of UK's leading universities.
You can see the petition here:
The highly respected South African anti-Apartheid activist, poet, and now leading academic, Dr ABNER NYAMENDE, has offered his support to the campaign by signing the petition expressing that he too continue to face racism as a black academic in white dominated South African universities. Nicole Franklin, the award-winning African-American filmmaker and producer, editor and director of television has also lent her support, as have others.
Many in UK's Black communities now consider equal access into academia as one of the most important civil rights issue of our generation.
Meanwhile here are just two of the many media reports on institutional and direct racism against black academics in UK universities:
1. Black lecturers: Victims of racism: BBC News
2. Report Reveal Pay Bias against black lecturers: The Guardian newspaper