Are we a racist university?
A Nouse poll has uncovered potentially worrying divisions between international and home students at York, with 49% of international students saying that they ‘feel excluded by British students’ and 30% saying that they have experienced what they consider to be racist attitudes from students or staff during their time at York. This comes at a time when concerns have been raised in some quarters about creeping racial tensions at the University and in York.
Speaking to Nouse on Sunday, Vice Chancellor Brian Cantor broke a long silence on student issues to express his support of international students, saying “The foreign students that come to York are a great benefit to the York community; they do very well, they’re good students, and they go on to do marvelous things in the world. There’s no way we wouldn’t want international students coming here.”
Of all the international students polled, 89% said they enjoy their courses, while 70% said they are involved in extra-curricular activities at the University. However, the Nouse poll, which was conducted over the internet, also revealed surprising levels of racial tension on campus, with many of the participants submitting detailed written accounts of what they consider to be personal experiences of racism.
One participant wrote “Non-academic staff seem to be prejudiced when seeing someone with an Asian appearance. The assumption seems to be that I should be pliant and not protesting when I’m treated in a lax way.” The same participant said he had experienced violent and threatening behaviour on and around campus, on one occasion when “someone in a car tried to attack me with an egg” and another when the driver of a BMW “attempted to intimidate me by pretending he wanted to run me over while I was crossing University Road.”
Bukky Ojo, last year’s SU Racial Equality Officer, said “During my officership, a lot of people did talk to us about experiencing racism on campus.”
Michael Batula, Ojo’s successor as Racial Equality Officer, said in a recent interview with the York Press “There are certainly not any racial undertones at the University. The Students’ Union at the moment is working very closely with the University to ensure all students – particularly internationals who may find it difficult – feel integrated into the University.”
However, concerns about underlying racial tensions in York have been augmented in recent months by the increased presence of the BNP, who put forward candidates in nine York wards in the recent council elections and gained 3,582 local votes. In February this year, Nouse reported that Ogtay Husseyni, chair of Islamic Society, was the victim of an alleged racist incident involving local BNP Officer Ian Dawson who allegedly approached Husseyni and photographed him, threatening to place his photograph on the far-right website Redwatch and telling him to “get out of my f**cking country”. The BNP have recently circulated leaflets in York calling for the burqa to be banned and immigration from Muslim countries to be halted.
Campus newspaper York Vision opened a new area for debate recently with the publication of an article headlined ‘Immigration Shambles’, which claimed “Incredible new evidence suggests that foreign students are exploiting the university to gain entry into Britain”. This claim was based on the fact that 43 foreign students, who have been granted student visas to enter Britain, have dropped out of their courses without informing the University during the last three years.
Of the York Vision article, Brian Cantor said on Sunday “I’m a believer in freedom of speech, but at the end of the day people will make up their own minds, and if you try and play a story up too much then you lose credibility. I’m not saying it has been played up too much; I’m not commenting on that, I’m just saying that the numbers are very low and that people should draw their own conclusions from that.”
“It is also worth noting that there are lots of British students whose whereabouts are unknown, because students have the right to decide where they go. International students are a credit to the University community and as such we should do our best to support visa requirements which make their entry possible.”
York Vision’s editorial (1/5/07) called for ‘students who claim visas on the basis of their place in York’ to be ‘thoroughly scrutinised before they are offered a place to study’. One participant in the Nouse poll said of the article “I found Vision’s latest headlines about the ‘Immigration Shambles’ extremely irritating…Jumping on the anti-immigrant band-wagon that the tackier publications of this country tout is a cheap step back. I have had an amazing time as an international student at York, and do not feel that a more stringent effort to supervise my behaviour would be anything but patronizing.”
Several of the participants in the poll suggested ways in which international students might become better integrated into the campus community. One wrote “I believe international students need to be more outgoing if they wish to improve their experiences. You have to immerse yourself in the culture here in order to gain the most from being in York. Another wrote “I would like to have more chances to meet local residents so as to engage with British culture more easily”. One participant wrote “Studying at York is the greatest experience of my life, but sometimes racist problems spoil it.”
Please read our correction regarding quotations taken from York Vision.
T Bob
It doesn’t help that a lot of the foreigners on campus make little or no effort to integrate.
The rest of this comment has been removed: please see our disclaimer. Inflammatory language does not constitute constructive discussion. If you have any questions about this, please email tech(at)nouse.co.uk.
Guest
This article seeks to imply a racist community off the back of a survey aimed solely at ‘international students’ thus discounting the views of the larger (bar the Chinese community) numbers of British students of Afro-Caribbean and Asian descent. Surely this article is missing a major point - that ‘international’ does not denote a different ‘race’. White-American students have been consulted when students of Asian descent from around the UK have not.
The headline ‘Are we a racist University?’ is certainly attention grabbing, but is it sending the right message? It seems to imply that ‘We’ the university means white, British, racists. The community of the university includes those who suffer racism at the hands of the university’s other members - the presumption of the headline seems as divisive as the attitudes the article seeks to uncover.
I am surprised at the quality of reporting from a usually impressive journalistic body. When interviewing the British former Racial Equality Officer did alarm bells not sound that such students were not a part of your survey? Did it not occur to refer to the housing policies surrounding international students which mean that whole houses and blocks with lets that extend over Easter are devoted to international students thus separating them from their British (white and otherwise) contemporaries from the moment of their arrival in York? As a third page news article, this would have seemed under-researched, but as a front page report it seems at best misguided, and at worst insulting to the non-white community of the university.
rinky stingpiece
There are so many ways to legitimately criticise and debunk both this article; its authors; its publishers; it readers; its sympathisers; that it would take up far too much of any commenters time to write or readers time to digest.
Perhaps this is the key issue.
The York student newspapers are so embarrassingly shameless in their efforts to court controversy that there seem no over-inflated incendiary claims they are willing to restrain themselves from publishing in order to provoke, polarise, and waste students’ time with.
To briefly analyse this front page “scandal”; they have recklessly invoked the term racism to justify a cynical semantic reinterpretation of a survey that simply says that 30% of international students feel excluded from university life without qualification of their tedious truth-twisting.
Lets unpack this disingenuous drivel bit by bit:
1. Not all “international students” are of “other races” (what on earth you mean by the term “race” remains unclear; but I assume you define “other races” as being those who are not of autochthonous EU-member-state-type extraction). There are plenty of north americans; loads of EU students, and probably a fair number from Eire and the Antipodes who may look like locals to most of us.
2. The interviewee mentioned, appear by implication of their description, to be likely to be muslim; islam is not a race, it’s a belief; an idea; an opinion. Religion and politics being essentially the same thing; we can infer a likely , and obvious set of reasons for why they might be; or perhaps more accurately, might FEEL, that they are being treated differently.
A man jolting his car forward so as to “pretend to run over” an Asian student, is reported as fact; when it’s clearly a subjective interpretation of an event, coloured by the prejudices of the subject; or not, as the case may be (I’m invoking the kind of objectivity here, that was appallingly lacking in this pi55-poor effort of an article).
3. “Racism” - what the hell does it mean? Are we talking about “ethnophobia”? Are we talking about “Groupism”, part of human and all life-forms genetic programming (Psychology students check your reading lists please!); or is it simply a euphamism for an abstract and ill-defined intangible concept known as “evil”?
Try this for a test - every article you read in Nouse or in NUS literature, try substituting the word “racist” for the word evil… it reads like the bible doesn’t it!
When I read this pseudoliberalist drivel, I’m reminded of the play “The Crucible” (English students, check your reading lists please!); or of McCarthyism (Politics students, your turn).
When I read the NUS web pages, I don’t see “ebony, and ivory, together as one in harmony etc…”; I see polarisation along racial phenotype lines.
The NUS doesn’t have a “racial-harmony society” it has a “black students society”… and includes photos of every single race: black, brown, red, yellow; but excludes white students from the literature. What message is that sending? If that’s not racism; what is?
When I glance through Nouse: the paper; the site; why is it every time I look there’s something about the BNP or other such things?
I’ve never seen any BNP or suchlike literature on campus outside of the bilge pumped out by Nouse-NUS: when I write it like that it looks like Sinn Fein-IRA doesn’t it!.
Maybe that’s it; maybe, just maybe, these Nouse-NUS people are so incestuous and obsessed that they are behaving like terrorists: silencing debate by witch-hunting and branding dissenters as “evil”, by using certain repetetive phrases?
Inflammatory comments like “creeping racial tensions” are just appalling.
Yes these issues are present in society, but this kind of witch-hunting serves only to intimidate well-intentioned ethically-minded patriots from raising even a whimper of criticism for fear of some legal or financial (read employment) penalty or sanction.
I have colleagues, friends who I do extra-curricular activities with (like sport) from all kinds of international backgrounds; yet I don’t see any moral problem with not wanting to set a precedent that would make it morally impossible to turn down citizenship requests from six billion people in the developing world. I speak Asian languages, but I don’t see why public funds should go into translating everything into foreign languages for public services - does that make me evil?!
Who are the racists? Who are the ones who are obsessed with race? Who are the ones that benefit from continually defining the debate in terms of white vs non-white: insinuating that racism is sonething that only white people do to non-white people?
J’accuse Nouse-NUS of stoking up hatred and polarising people on the basis of something they call race, but fail to define, so that they can raise their status as campaigners for a crisis that doesn’t exist until they create it.
I think their behaviour is reckless, immature, and irresponsible.
Frankly, it’s about time someone was taken to court for incitement to racial hatred against white British people - we cannot be the world’s whipping boys any longer.
David Brennan
T Bob, you are full of nonsense. Your ilk moves to Spain and France to get away from the “foreigners”, and then you don’t even bother to integrate ….. hypocrites
rinky stingpiece
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David Brennan
May 11th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
T Bob, you are full of nonsense. Your ilk moves to Spain and France to get away from the “foreigners”, and then you don’t even bother to integrate ….. hypocrites”
What a load of logically fallacious, prejudiced assumptions.
What you really mean by this red herring is that Tbob is not allowed to suggest that people who come here should make an effort to integrate.
To expose your prejudice, just so it’s crystal clear:
If TBob made the statement that:
“All students from all countries who study in other countries should respect the culture make an effort to integrate”
You would not be able to criticise him.
If he said that:
“All students from this country who study in a foreign country should respect the culture make an effort to integrate”
You would champion him as a paragon of tolerance and pseudoliberal virtue.
however, dare he say that
“All students from a foreign country who study in this country should respect the culture make an effort to integrate”
then you insinuate that he is a hypocrite and a bigot.
Well I’ve got news for you, you have just proven that YOU are the hypocrite, and YOU are the bigot.
more shocking than that, you have exposed yourself as a RACIST against native British people and their culture… which may well be your own racial phenotype and culture, which makes you:
a. an idiot, for not understanding the implications of what you are saying.
b. a sheep, for simply parroting opinions expressed by other idiots without thinking for yourself.
and
c. a member of the youth wing of the fascist pseudoliberal cult, for floating around your intellectual olympus bullying and victimising people in the name of “freedom” and “tolerance” without understanding what these concepts truly mean.
…shut up and go back to your playstation.
Admin
A correction to this article is now online here:
http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/05/14/correction-are-we-a-racist-university/
Emma
Web Ed