Toby Young Toby Young

Universities don’t need to be lectured about racism

issue 02 November 2019

I’ve been contacted by a professor at a leading Russell Group university who is worried about the spread of progressive dogma in the UK’s higher education sector. He highlighted last week’s report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which claimed that around a quarter of students from ethnic minority backgrounds at Britain’s universities have experienced racial harassment. He fears that this will be used by left-wing activists on campus as ‘proof’ that the higher education sector is ‘systemically racist’ and lead to further calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. He’s also concerned that he’ll have to spend more time at ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ workshops, where he’s lectured by privately educated white men in their early twenties about ‘unconscious bias’, as well as dealing with vexatious complaints from social justice warriors in his department. ‘Britain’s universities are in the grip of their own version of China’s cultural revolution,’ he says.

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