Cuts risk wiping out UK's black scholarship

Redundancies and course closures risk wiping out black scholarship in the UK, leading academics have warned.

- Aamna Mohdin

Universities in England have implemented a number of cost-cutting measures after being engulfed in a financial crisis. Now prominent academics and students are raising the alarm that many of these cuts are falling on lecturers and courses that have played a leading role in addressing racial disparities in higher education.

The University of Chichester made Prof Hakim Adi redundant and cut his MRes on the history of Africa and the African diaspora.

Prof Robert Beckford, the well-known theologian who researched climate and social justice, has been made redundant at the University of Winchester, and Birmingham City University (BCU) has shut its black studies undergraduate course.

While Goldsmiths, University of London reversed plans to cut its black British literature MA, stating it would commit to running the course for another two years after an outcry, it recently made the founder and convener of the course, Prof Deirdre Osborne, redundant.

Kadija George Sesay, who was one of several writers to sign an open letter criticising the move, told the Guardian that she had returned her honorary fellowship to Goldsmiths.

In the past decade, there have been notable advances in the creation of dedicated lectureships, and broader curriculum development in black history, culture, politics and philosophy in higher education. This, as well as active mentoring and recruitment of academics of colour, led to improvements in the number of black professors in the UK.