Stupidity takes hold of another students’ union

I had never heard the acronym Soas before I started work at the BBC, almost 30 years ago. But as a very young producer at the corporation I was asked to fix up a story about something appalling happening in Africa — I can’t remember exactly what. Famine or cannibalism maybe. Or perhaps one mitigated by the other. The senior producer told me to get someone from Soas to explain it all. What’s Soas, I asked?

‘The School of Oriental and African Studies,’ I was informed. ‘It’s in London. It’s basically a place where we try to work out what on earth the natives are up to now.’

It was a different BBC back then. I was based in the old Broadcasting House, at the top of Regent Street. An eight-floor building — the first seven floors pretty much exclusively white. But then loads of black people working on the top floor — that was the canteen. By the time I left the BBC in 2004 things had changed markedly. The canteen was still staffed almost exclusively by black people. But now there were lots of black people several floors lower down, not serving food at all — in the ‘Community Affairs Unit’. Progress, then, of a kind.

I suspect Soas has changed quite a bit, too. As far as I can discern, it now seems to be a place for castigating whitey and especially British whitey. Fair enough — I suppose we need castigating, and it’s good for the soul. But it has got itself in the news recently as a consequence of the demands of its students’ union, which has outflanked even the students’ unions of Oxford and University College London in the cretin stakes. Which takes some doing.