Coming from the US, I found this comparative essay deeply resonant. I left the US, and higher education in general, undergoing a deep and painful and messy reckoning with issues of racial justice. Even considering the response to the BLM protests by drama departments in higher education, abuses and inequalities that had been ignored for too long were suddenly incendiary leading to student protests, resignations of senior professors, and demands for the immediate recomposition of university teaching staffs.
Coming to the UK, I have spent the last year trying to understand how issues of race and ethnicity operate in the UK context. While there have been many similarities, there are also significant differences. Despite the many reports of police racism, sexism, and homophobia by British police, nothing compares to the lethal violence prevalent in the US. I also think that the UK is better equipped to discuss the intersection of race and economic than the US, whereas race is the sole category considered in most US discourse.
As this article demonstrates however, to isolate race and economic issues becomes a something of a shell game. Holmwood’s critique that “diversity” can be achieved through an increase in high fee-paying international students and heralded as part of merit-based goals reveals the complete hollowness of neoliberal cooptation of these terms divorced from goals of social transformation and reparation of the historical crimes and inequalities produced by colonial and imperialism. Coming from the US, I can see how the UK’s nationalized fee-setting policies have the material effect of creating more economically (and hence racially) diverse cohorts of students, and I can only hope the UK does not follow the US’s individualist, meritocratic and therefore socially conservative path.
Reference
Holmwood, J. “Race and the Neoliberal University: Lessons From the Public University” in Gurminder K Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nisancioglu (eds) Decolonizing the University? Pluto Press, 2018.