December 22, 2020 - 3:11pm
You might think it would be uncontroversial to argue, as Liz Truss did recently, that ‘we need the equality debate to be led by facts not by fashion’. Yet the reaction to her speech — labelled ‘bonkers’ by rival politicians — suggests otherwise. To see why Truss’s words caused such a stir, look no further than Universities UK (UUK), the collective voice of Britain’s vice-chancellors. In November UUK issued a report, Tackling Racial Harassment in Higher Education, which aims to institute sweeping changes in universities, led not by facts but by the voguish tenets of critical race theory (CRT).
That’s not just an interpretation of the report, by the way. UUK explicitly announces that ‘This guidance draws on the framework of critical race theory’, an approach which ‘explains that white domination is normalised and therefore seen as natural’. Contrary to how most people think of universities — as liberal, tolerant, inclusive institutions — a CRT perspective allows UUK to ‘know’ that the racism which is ‘endemic in UK society… also pervades higher education’.
On that basis, UUK calls on students to audit their professors’ courses to ensure the ‘representation of diversity within materials used in lectures and tutorials’. In staff training, universities should ‘incorporate the concepts of white privilege and white fragility, white allyship, microaggressions and intersectionality, as well as racialised unconscious bias training’.
UUK urges universities to ‘acknowledge the institutional racism and systemic issues that pervade the entire higher education sector, in all institutions’, but admits that it has ‘no regular data that fully identifies the nature, scale and prevalence of racial harassment in higher education’.
Astonishingly, given the large-scale change it is calling for, UUK did not conduct its own study of the problem it claims to address. Instead, it relied on research published in 2019 by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which in turn was farmed out to a private consultancy, IFF Research. As we show in our counter-report, the underpinning research is one-sided and methodologically flawed.
The key focus of the UUK report is racial harassment on university campuses. Here the findings generated by the EHRC’s small-scale study should be treated with caution, but instead the tendency is to generalise wildly on the basis of slim evidence. The Guardian reported last year that the research showed that ‘the equivalent of 60,000 students nationwide’ had reported racist incidents to their university; a fraction of the ‘180,000 students across the UK’ who suffered racial harassment in the first six months of the academic year. Now UUK is seeking to generate more alarmist headlines from the same EHRC report.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeBest to start with the ‘Frankfurt School’ (of thought) a 1930′ German Marxist intellectual University group including some famous minds. It was based on “Critical Theory” where social matters were viewed through Marxist views to liberate the people from suppression.
But to really get a quick take on Frankfurt School aims google ‘Frankfurt School 11 Points’. Note how close to home they hit?
The entire Liberal Left self loathing being taught from cradle to grave, but mostly through the education system, becomes easier to understand. They want to destroy the West, themselves, and you, to herald in a new global dystopia of unrelenting misery. They could never create a society which is 10% as good as this one, so they aim to tear this one down.
Spot on….it is all going far beyond a joke. I don’t know about *defund the Police* we should think about *defunding Universities* the V/Cs are sitting in their £100K+, £200k++ a year, with pension nailed in, and messing around with contentious rubbish that is so divisive it’s unbelievable.
These are the people that almost to a man and a woman went on about Leave voters being thick or racist. They need to give their heads a wobble, they have gone so far off piste there isn’t any snow under their skis.
Its good to see some free thinking in academia and some actual fact based debate. Good luck I fear you will need it given the bigoted nature of wokery and their penchant for cancel culture.
By encouraging students to audit their courses and ‘call out’ fellow students for racism, UUK reveals itself to be a Maoist organisation, placing everyone from professors down in fear of denounciation by a small clique.
The problem with CRT that many of its adherents seem doggedly unaware of, is that it can be turned against them at an instant. White privilege can easily be substituted for black privilege, thin privilege, female privilege etc. in any case it’s a convenient tool employed by the wealthy with which to obfuscate where true privilege lies.
Inevitably the pendulum swings.
That seems obvious. I’m not a marxist, but I see the problems when Amazon pays no taxes at all, etc.
I passed a black lady on the way home from the shops this evening. Before I passed her I walked into the road. That is, I actively socially distanced myself, from her, because of covid. I wondered afterwards if that could be construed as a microagression. I concluded that it probably could, but it would depend on the person.
What state have we got ourselves into when we don’t even know if we should be polite because we might offend someone? Also, the entire concept needs to be questioned because it gives power to people who find offence and don’t need to provide evidence that any offence was intended.
Stepping into the road to avoid one another? It’s precisely this kind of deranged behaviour that is corroding the social fabric of the nation.
not a microaggression, but perhaps a hysterical over-reaction to covid.
CRT is an ideology of hate and it should be treated as such. There really is not much more to say. We landed in Normandy to end this kind of ethic conflict and classifications and yet here we are bending and scraping because the CRT spokes people claim to be “victims” We forget that victims have a will to power of their own, one that is not afraid to lie for power.
Well put…
“I believe the most qualified person should get the job”-anyone who puts statements of this sort forward as examples of “microaggressions” should be denied choice of surgeons, auto mechanics, airline pilots, chefs…as with everything else that these elitists with assured positions and incomes posit, it is ludicrously disingenuous.
Causing division between races has a long history. All history shows it results in loss of academic freedom, loss of freedom of speech and ultimately oppression based on race. Critical race theory has echoes of the cause of terrible events in Europe not that long ago.
Thank goodness we have Lizz Truss starting the roll back of this nonsense, the education minister needs to get onboard and tackle this left wing woke thuggery. A good start will be the repeal of the equalities legislation and disbanding of the EHRC.
Excellent, data rich article published on Quillette in the last couple of days highlighting (in the US) the relative success of a significant proportion of minorities. Worth a look.
That essay is: A Peculiar Kind of Racist Patriarchy for those wanting to look it up.
“As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories”higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823).
@unherdlimited-02af07ab8a2782c8790a015fb912f677:disqus
The idpols have an easy way out: as per NYU and other universities, I think – just exclude Asians or Asian Americans from minority identity groups or PoC
In the same fashion what used to be referred to Hispanic or Latino Americans, now Latinx, have been separated in many sub groups, some white, some POC
https://www.commentarymagaz…
Because a lot too many of them voted for Trump, now the rules have been changed along with the language
It is confounding to realise that this is not in any way a program based on reason but wholly dependent on perceived or intended outcome – not equality or equity or anything it may be supposed to be, but: preserve victim status, divide and rule,
Remember Biden and his definition of black as democrat
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,”
@@unherdlimited-02af07ab8a2782c8790a015fb912f677:disqus
The idpols have an easy way out: as per NYU and other universities, I think – just exclude Asians or Asian Americans from minority identity groups or PoC
In the same fashion what used to be referred to Hispanic or Latino Americans, now Latinx, have been separated in many sub groups, some white, some POC
https://www.commentarymagaz…
Because a lot too many of them voted for Trump, now the rules have been changed along with the language
It is confounding to realise that this is not in any way a program based on reason but wholly dependent on perceived or intended outcome – not equality or equity or anything it may be supposed to be, but: preserve victim status, divide and rule,
Remember Biden and his definition of black as democrat
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,”
Critical Race Theory is a subtle process of cultural nazification by politically motivated overpaid educational burocracies!
If we defunded universities for ..well maybe 3 hours….after one hour the chin-scratching, high horsing well paid Vice Chancellors would suddenly see some flaws in the thing.
Society may be a construct..but if you have to find your own salary rather than have it larderd at you, you quickly find that money has very tangible realities..multiple and over lapping.
When UUK launched this bull I thought about the last racist incident I’d witnessed in the University where I work, the ‘victim’ was a white British staff member, the aggressor was a high caste Chinese student and talking with our black students they’ve almost never had a problem with white students, they had however suffered monkey noises and nasty race based comments from fellow undergrad Chinese students. This seems to be the pattern of most racial incidents we have on campus and moreover in Halls of residence.
Much is also being made of decolonising the curriculum, this is an affront both to student learning and and our history, if enacted as fully as the marxists would like many overseas students will simply have no reason to come here to learn from a Western perspective. We might hope the variARSE Vice Chancellors who make up the UUK end up unemployed as well as being unemployable if that happens, though as many have both USS and private ‘gold plated’ pensions they probably won’t care.
The ‘willing suspension of unbelief’ has been replaced by the mandated injunction to believe whatever nonsense can be conjured up by whacko theorists.
Well done, Philip.
OK. Link removed as these NEVER seem to get moderated
I refer to this site – futurcities dot org dot uk article “Myth of Britain’s racist universities” easy to find
Please provide me with the following information
1. “Critical race theory” as now being implemented at the British Library is no more than (as the nomenclature indicates) a theory, and one allied to an ideology which is rejected by almost all Britons.
2. Given that, please provide formal referenced proof that CRT is correct and accurate, and reflects society as it is. Statistics will full citations will be needed, with all backup literature.
3. The BL belongs to us, the British taxpayer.
4. Given that, please indicate what in the BL constitution or equivalent, gives it the authority to implement the product of an unproven ideology in what is a public institution.
5. Also, full evidence that there is a public mandate (after all, the BL belongs, as it were, to me, and not whoever is head of the BL. They run it on OUR behalf).
Kind regards
UUK urges universities to ‘acknowledge the institutional racism and systemic issues…..but admits that it has ‘no regular data that fully identifies the nature, scale and prevalence of racial harassment in higher education’.
Why bother with pesky facts that can upset a narrative. If these ‘issues’ exist in universities, entrusting the same people with the solution is an exercise in fox-henhouse theory.
Human beings group and connect through family and tribe, a common natural behaviour.Tribal preference and tribal loyalty is observed and accepted in all groups, but is only demonised , criminalised and prohibited in one particular skin color in the countries and societies they built, by a political dogma driven faction forcefully imposing its creed on all.
This Critical Race Theory faction is verifiably guilty of everything they accuse and violate basic human rights and the principles of western civilization even in the tyrannical implementation of their conflicted self contradictory cult dogma.
The moral and intellectual flaws and unjust damage they inflict and their serious destructive motives are well known and articulated.
The question now is, what do we do about it.
I witnessed at first hand a racist incident at my college in the early 90s. I won’t name the institution as, you know, long memories etc. One lunchtime in a busy refectory, an African student whom I didn’t know very well had to endure a load of non-verbal noise from a table of four male students from my year course. I approached the African student shortly afterwards asking if he was alright, and was left in no doubt that he wanted the incident to be forgotten as he didn’t want to cause a fuss or be seen as a troublemaker. Call incidents like this ‘banter’ if you must, but I was disturbed to encounter that level of stupidity and ignorance from some of my actual classmates. Thirty years later and we’re discussing how to define what a racial incident actually is, and I need to say that while the line is a much finer one in the 2020s, that the concept of ‘microaggression’ doesn’t appear to mean much aside from someone feeling patronised or underappreciated by people whom they view to hold positions of authority in academic areas. This is also something I have experienced at first hand, and again, always from ‘white’ people.
As is entirely predictable, the author of the above article is not the least bothered by Orientals dominating Chinese universities.
My FoI request to the British Library on this very matter.
Pile in. All these institutions we fund need calling out
==========================================================
Ref
http://futurecities.org.uk/…
Please provide me with the following information
1. “Critical race theory” as now being implemented at the British Library is no more than (as the nomenclature indicates) a theory, and one allied to an ideology which is rejected by almost all Britons.
2. Given that, please provide formal referenced proof that CRT is correct and accurate, and reflects society as it is. Statistics will full citations will be needed, with all backup literature.
3. The BL belongs to us, the British taxpayer.
4. Given that, please indicate what in the BL constitution or equivalent, gives it the authority to implement the product of an unproven ideology in what is a public institution.
5. Also, full evidence that there is a public mandate (after all, the BL belongs, as it were, to me, and not whoever is head of the BL. They run it on OUR behalf).
Kind regards
Thanks Philip. Keep up the good work (if they allow you to…)
‘Art, Race and Transformation’
Very interesting interview with Chloe Valdary on ‘rebelwisdom dot co dot uk’.
She believes that Critical Race Theory is a betrayal of the artistic heritage of Black America. She covers the legacy of black art, the inheritance of Martin Luther King and much more.
It’s in the Culture War section