Open Letter: Defund to Decolonise Leeds University

We call on students, staff, alumni and supporters to show their commitment to anti-racism by:

1. Signing this letter HERE
2. Sending an email (sample text HERE) to the Vice-Chancellor, Alan Langlands, and Alumni and Development team stating your support for Black people and intention to withhold any donations until Leeds University dismantles its problem with anti-Black racism and shows it believes that Black lives matter.
3. Share the campaign widely — you can share this link on FB or Twitter or share our instagram @defundtodecoloniseleedsuni. Hit us up on there or via email (at the bottom of this letter) if you want to connect!

Dear Alumni, Vice Chancellor and members of the University Council,

Firstly, we extend our love and solidarity to our diasporic siblings in the US, and globally, resisting police brutality and state-sanctioned violence today and everyday. We hold space to mourn all those Black folk whose lives are marked as disposable day in, day out and who have also been navigating the necropolitics of COVID-19. We hold close all Black folk who have found the last few weeks especially difficult on a back of lifetimes made heavy with the weight of anti-Blackness. We remember all of those Black folk whose names we do know, and whose names we don’t, who have had their lives ended or irreparably damaged by anti-Blackness and White supremacy and chase something like justice for them.

George Floyd, David Oluwale, Breonna Taylor, Jimmy Mubenga, Nina Pop, Sean Rigg, Tony McDade, Cherry Groce, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Naomi Hersi, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Erica Garner, Sarah Reed, Rashan Charles, Sara Baartman, Emanuel Gomes, João Pinto and so, so, so many more matter endlessly.

We write to you in response to your recent statements made across social media that the University of Leeds ‘stand[s] with our Black staff and students, friends and family’. Respectfully, from what we know of the institution this is not the case. Black people who come into contact with the institution are routinely undermined, brutalised, abused and reminded at every turn that they are seen as less than human. Whilst the actions of the University, its staff and students may not be caught on camera the results have left many of us unable to breathe.

The recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matters movement has only underlined how pervasive anti-Blackness is globally and that the fight for Black liberation is more urgent than ever. If the University wishes to make such statements then it is well past time that the University implemented radical changes to finally make the institution, not only bearable for Black members of the Leeds community but, a place that allows them to thrive. The University must also look beyond the academy and into the surrounding areas. It must stop hoarding at the top of the hill and find a way to exist within and to the benefit of the wider community in Leeds and around the world.

Until now the University has been committed to an agenda of feigning ignorance to the fact that it has a pervasive problem with racism and thus failing to make the necessary changes. We call on all alumni who believe Anti-blackness, or other forms of racism, should not continue unchecked at Leeds to demonstrate allyship by signing this letter and suspend all alumni donations until radical changes are effected and the University finally values Black people.

To better understand why we are making this demand we have pulled together a brief summary of the current state of affairs at Leeds:

• The University currently only employs one Black professor
• Black students are vastly underrepresented at the University.
• According to figures published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) the University has 3785 academic staff but only 40 Black full time staff
• In 2018/19 there was an awarding gap of 25.9% between Black and White students for 1st class degrees. Only 7.9% of Black students were awarded 1st class degrees compared to 33.3% of White students. This awarding gap has widened by 8% since 2015.
• In 2018/19 Black students were awarded Third Class degrees or Fails 2.6 times more often than White students.
• In 2017/18 there was a gap of 28.9% between White and Black students being awarded a 2.i degree or above. Only 61.1% of Black students graduated with a 2.i or above.
• The awarding gap between BAME and White students has been rising since 2013/14.
• In 2018/19 Black students were 78% more likely to drop out than White students
• There is a 14.5% gap in access for BAME students
• In 2017/18 there was a 39% pay gap between Black and White Staff
• White staff saying n*gger in seminars
• Lack of Black counsellors and disparity in the treatment between Black and White students; this often results in Black students being turned away because counsellors could not offer ‘effective’ support which is never the case for White students
• Racist abuse in halls — Black students are often forced into the choice of moving into unaffordable living situations or stay and tolerate racist abuse without support
• Black and POC PhD students being denied teaching opportunities often by White staff who make their career writing about BIPOC
• Students feel that when they commit to expanding their curriculum off and broadening knowledge they cite so it is not so narrowly Eurocentric they are marked down
• Micro-aggressions: these can range from anywhere between infantilisation and outright abuse. Micro-aggressions are not considered racist abuse by the university and cannot be recognised as such through its official complaint structures. This reveals that the current system is entirely unfit for purpose and that the University lacks a basic understanding of racism and the way that micro-aggressions accumulate and make life on campus unbearable.

Why are we asking students/ staff/ societies/ alumni to sign this letter and suspend donations — even if they do not currently do so — to the University of Leeds?

Our experiences and the data collected make it clear that to the University of Leeds Black people do not matter. We believe that alumni donations do however. We call on alumni to inform Leeds University that Black people do matter to you and demand urgent reforms by refusing to make any further donations, cancel any existing direct debits and ask for your contact details to be removed from records. We would also encourage you to redirect the funds you would have donated to Leeds to the host of organisations that are committed to ensuring Black folk have access to joyful and dignified lives. Maybe once the University begins to feel the financial impact of their organised neglect of the Black community they may finally be pushed to take this problem seriously and effect long overdue change. We have included a sample email to send to the Alumni and development department here.

Over the course of many years, countless people have attempted to engage the University on these issues. This work has often gone unpaid, ignored and ultimately marginalised. . Campaigns such as ‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ have been promoted on campus but the University has failed to truly engage with the task of decolonisation. Rather than support the campaign, marking the first steps towards ensuring Black folk no longer face institutional racism on the daily, the University has instead sought to appropriate and monetise the decolonisation movement, citing this as a manner in which ‘to attract students from diverse backgrounds’. At its core, the university has demonstrated a lack of understanding as to the necessity of such decolonial praxis for the survival and thriving of Black folk. The university describes the attainment gap between Black and White students as ‘unexplained’. Given this lack, Black folk suffer the excesses of white supremacy on the daily. The University demonstrates its ignorance on the nature and prevalence of racism, none the least evidenced by its poor reporting mechanism for racist incidents which is, at the least, unfit for the purpose, and at the most, designed to neutralise and deny the violence of such racist incidents. Race Equality Frameworks and Diversity & Inclusion committees do not reflect a commitment to the cause of eradicating Anti-Blackness at the university. Policy documents which seem to address these systemic inequalities do not, and have not, redressed those inequalities. The steps necessary to make progress in tackling the anti-Blackness that has undergirded so many of our experiences at Leeds have been generously offered, time and time again, and through all the channels available, but time and time again the University at all levels has refused to take the action needed.

The above list of our experiences at the University — by no means exhaustive — offers an image of what Leeds’ contributions have been to a sector which is institutionally racist. Of the almost 20,000 professors in the UK only 25 Black women. According to a 2019 report by AdvanceHE only 0.6% of UK professors. The conditions that have led to such statistics have only been nurtured and rendered permissible at all UK HEIs, including Leeds University. The above list barely summarises the ways in which universities have continuously stifled Black students and staff. The hashtag #BlackInIvory and the work of Leading Routes have made clear the way that the academy is hostile to Black academics. One of the points of the University’s Educational Engagement strategy 2016/ 2020 was to ‘narrow the gaps in access, retention and student success through systematic support for students at every stage and in all aspects of their learning journey’. Yet despite this stated aim and the labour of so many, the awarding gap is only widening and systematic support is not there.

However, this is about much more than awarding gaps. It is about the trauma of having to spend time at an institution that is committed to Anti-Blackness, despite its claims to the contrary. It is about the lasting damage of Anti-Blackness, and its pervasiveness at every level. It is about Leeds University’s extractive relationship with Black people globally; whether this is evidenced by its scholarship and inequitable processes of knowledge production, or its historic and material gains. It was only in 2019 that the University divested from significant fossil fuel extractors like Shell — the University has directly profited off of the extraction and destruction of areas like the Niger Delta and the death of activists like the Ogoni Nine. It is about Leeds University’s exploitative relationship with Black people globally, whether this is through gaining status and reputation as ‘excellence in research’, where that research is done on the backs of our histories, or its establishment of an exclusionary Ivory Tower which fails to anchor itself in the city to which it looks down.

If, as the University states, ‘at the heart of [its] mission […] is the desire to see all students realise their potential’ then you will urgently implement radical change. Is it disappointing that there are conference proceedings on Leeds’ own website from 1997 that highlight many of the same failures as we do now 23 years later. The University’s recent statement is not good enough. Vague platitudes are not good enough. The University’s ineffective ‘Equality’ committees are not good enough. Real harm is being done to Black people on this campus every single day and it has to stop.

Our demands, many of which have been made before and ignored, include:

1. Issue an acknowledgement that the University is institutionally racist and anti-Black and commit to urgently changing this.

To solve a problem it must first be acknowledged. Despite being based in a city with a rich Black history, which the Leeds Black History Walk highlights with care, the University systematically fails Black folk. We are in a global turning point in Black liberation and the University must play its part. We call on the University to be as actively involved in the struggle for justice, equity, and Black lives as we are. Leeds University may not be littered with notoriously visible colonial reminders such as statues of Cecil Rhodes but the colonial reverberations are keenly felt. We didn’t need statues to serve as reminders that the University is an incubator of racial inequality and inequity our reading lists, interactions and experiences more than sufficed. The University has an obligation and duty to confront anti-Blackness and disrupt silence on these issues. The University is supposed to be a crucible for critical thinking — as such non-Black people have a responsibility to think through and act in ways that support, affirm, and advocate for Black folks now and always. The University can do this by understanding that the nation-building project of ‘Great Britain’ and its empire was founded on anti-Black chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Leeds University should confront how the University is entangled with this history, promotes its anti-Black logic and disappears the truth. One way that the University can do this is by acknowledging that white supremacy and race logic are embedded within it in ways that privilege Whiteness and mark Black people as inferior and disposable. This is not the case. That acknowledgment then needs to be followed by action. Not reports, not hand-wringing but a commitment to radically restructuring the University and seriously undertaking the work of ending the anti-Blackness that pervades it. Leeds University needs to dismantle the brick wall, discussed by Sara Ahmed, and do the work.

2. Decolonise the curriculum.

This work has largely been led by students, Union officers and staff of colour. The University has failed to make a real commitment to this work but has quite happily used the labour done by these people, often without institutional support and with downright hostility, to improve its external image. The University needs to commit to the task of finally decolonising the curriculum across the entire university and throw institutional support behind this project.

3. Provide counselling services to Black students.

It is well documented that there is a student mental health crisis but Leeds University fails to support Black students in this regard. Despite often being driven to the counselling service as a result of the anti-Blackness they experience in Leeds Black students are routinely turned away by the counselling service or offered very poor support that often negates the racism we attest to. We demand that the University urgently draws up and implements a concrete action plan to ensuring that the counselling service is fit for purpose for all students.

This University should publish the demographic makeup of its counsellors and ensure Black students are able to request Black counsellors. If the University recognises that is unable to provide adequate mental health support to Black students then it should formally enter into a Service Level Agreement with local charitable organisations who can provide such support such as Touchstone or the Black Health Initiative. The University also needs to ensure that any mental health support is able to support the needs of Black students who are mature students, estranged, care leavers, LGBT+, are from a refugee/ asylum-seeking background, have caring responsibilities or who have a disability or long-term health condition or who are further marginalised.

4. Support Black Societies

Racist and classist University social themes were reported in The Gryphon as early as 2015 but no action was taken. The University continues to lavish funds on such clubs, which often exclude Black students, whilst radical Black-led societies are under-funded despite the critical role they play on campus. The Union and University should urgently review its funding model for clubs and societies to ensure that such societies which provide a sense of safety in hostile surrounds are no longer under-funded.

5. Tackle the poverty that a number of Black students face.

As it stands many Black students are not able to financially support themselves even with loans and paid employment which can often be hard to secure as a Black person in Leeds. Some Black students are accessing food banks, relying on the support of their friends to survive and in extreme cases are forced into homelessness and sex work. We are not condemning sex work but just wish for an environment where Black folk are not forced into situations they would not otherwise enter through poverty. When Black students approach the University they are told that the Hardship Fund is not available to them or given very small sums that do not materially help their conditions. The experience of compiling applications, revealing your vulnerability to then be turned away is damaging and when students of colour compare their experiences trying to access material and emotional support to their White peers they see racialised undercurrents. The University should be collecting and publishing anonymised data on awards made by the Hardship Fund as well as much clearer guidelines and feedback on the decision-making process. They should also reflect on whether the current system is fit for purpose especially for students who may be experiencing domestic abuse. The University needs to reassess how support is provided and whether it is available to those who really need it especially with regards to bursaries and scholarships which are too often awarded to students from well-off backgrounds.

6. Study abroad options should be broadened to include universities in African and Caribbean nations and the University should provide support and advice for Black students when they encounter racism whilst abroad. Many Black students are unable to even consider studying abroad due to lack of funding and/ or well-founded fear of racism. The University has to meaningfully address this and ensure that their partners are practicing anti-racism themselves. |”

7. Provide support for students who are Black and experience other forms of marginalisation such as those who are from low-income backgrounds, international students, care leavers, are carers, estranged students, mature students, disabled students and those who have a disability or long-term health condition.

These students feel unsupported on campus with good reason. The University needs to adopt an intersectional approach to support and ensure that these students who are bright and have so much to contribute are not forced out of the University or made miserable. Leeds University needs to understand that the hostility of its staff to students from such backgrounds is not good enough and ensure that where staff are doing so action is taken. We would also like to see figures in relation to plagiarism disaggregated — anecdotal evidence suggests that Black students are frequently accused of plagiarism as staff frankly do not have faith in their abilities.

8. Identify and dismantle the barriers to University for Black people in Leeds.

Only a handful of Black sixth-form leavers in Leeds choose to study at the University of Leeds. It is reasonable to expect any educational institution that posits a desire to challenge the attainment gap must consider the conditions in its own backyard. The University has for too long treated local Black communities as less than an afterthought. Students who have progressed through the wave of white oppression in primary and secondary schools hardly see the University as a haven worth considering. This is telling of the blatant disregard that the University currently employs in its duty of care to young Black people and their access to HE.

The right to education remains inviolable throughout a person’s life. In meeting its duties to the Black community in Leeds and all over the world, the University must implement wider options for Black adults and carers. It is imperative that the University of Leeds give serious consideration to the true essence of dismantling barriers to education.

9. Commit effort and resource to the Black community of Leeds — the University needs to understand its role and become part of the community.

The University is to support organisations and platforms created by the Black community in Leeds, current and former Black students and students of colour. Many Black students have created their own communities of care outside of the University. As Black students are slowly forced out of living and social situations by the racism inflicted by their peers (and overlooked by the University), the University has failed to protect their spaces from the encroachment of racism. The University is just a 1.5 miles from Chapeltown but we see little meaningful interaction between the University and the city’s Black community.

Furthermore, the University must follow the lead of Black students and organisations, such as the Black Feminist Society, in protecting Black-owned businesses. The University has a responsibility to invest in the spaces that act as a source of support and community, that is otherwise not provided by the University. It is an unsurprising affront to Black students and the wider Black community that the University did not support Délice D’Ivoire when confronted with anti-black bias by Blackwell’s; an act that threatened the continuance of the stall. The University boasts of having a ‘diverse’ range of students, but does not care to protect the rights of an African food-stall on campus, which is a big attraction to many Black students and source of community. Instead of at the bare minimum making a statement of solidarity, or, more hopefully, committing resources to the aid of Black students and businesses, the University and Union declined to comment. That silence, was and remains violence.

10. Defund research that is overtly or covertly anti-Black or promotes policing, prisons, or immigration detention.

Shortly after expressing support for Black Lives Matter academics at the University applied for, and were awarded, £666,000 for research working with the Metropolitan Police, Durham and Lancashire constabularies. The University proudly posted about this on its website but it smacks of hypocrisy to state Black Lives Matter and then flaunt the fact that you are working with police forces who were recognised as ‘institutionally racist’ in the Macpherson Report and who continue to over-police Black communities to this day. This is just one example that suggests Leeds University does not truly understand that Black Lives Matter is not merely a hashtag.

10. No more cops on campus.

There should be no police embedded in the University’s security team or present on campus. According to data released by the Home Office, fifty one years after David Oluwale was hounded to death by the West Yorkshire Police, they are nearly than three times more likely to use force on those who identify as Black versus their White peers. Their presence adds to the unsafe climate on campus for Black folk. The police are agents of state-sanctioned racialised violence and should not be based here. Any defence that they make the campus safer begs the question for who and have been repeatedly challenged by abolitionists.

11. Commit to publishing annual reports of hate crime reporting to the University disaggregated by type and outcome by 1 July of each year and publish clear maps of possible outcomes where staff and students are found to have committed a hate crime.

A 2019 report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that 29% of Black students reported being racially harassed since the start of their course and most staff said the abuser was a colleague. The University only recorded seven formal complaints of racism from 2014–2019 but this only reveals the lack of trust in reporting systems as each of us could name more than seven incidents that we experienced individually.

12. Become a Real Living Wage employer for all staff, including those who are outsourced, and ensure sick pay schemes are implemented.

It is disproportionately BAME staff who are affected by low wages and precarious work. Currently some staff are on less than minimum wage when they calculate their workload. This is unacceptable. The University should immediately implement and take pride in paying staff a real living wage that allows them security and implement sick pay schemes as the current crisis has only underlined how important they are for public and personal health. The University should also undertake risk assessments for all members of staff, especially those who are BAME, if and when they ask them to return to campus and ensure safe working conditions.

13. End Prevent trainings and replace them with anti-racism and mental health trainings for staff.

Prevent embeds the hostile environment in the classroom and disproportionately targets Black and Muslim folks. Until such time as Prevent is abolished the University should commit to switching its focus on constructive and sorely needed training for staff not those that encourage discriminatory surveillance.

14. Commit to paying immigration fees for all migrant staff.

Migrant staff who are often BAME are currently forced to regularly fund large and unfair visa fees. As an employer that wishes to attract the most talented staff, irrespective of background, the University should join the 50% of the Russell Group that do meet the cost of visa fees for their staff.

15. Improve recruitment of Black staff at all levels of the University as well as the University Council and other governance structures.

One practical step the University could take would be to end the practice of all white interview shortlists. However, that will not be an instant solution and will not be enough if who are hiring, or are hired, are still committed to maintaining the status-quo.

16. Commit to publishing data annually on hiring practices and the ethnicity of applicants and eventual hires as well as report ethnic makeup of staff and students at school, department and University level.

17. Take the lead from Leeds’ UCU branch and make a donation of at least £50,000 to the Free Black University initiative, founded by alumni Melz Owusu, in recognition that the University systematically fails Black students and as a form of reparations for the harm done.

This is less than the equivalent of the fees for two undergraduate students and would help enable the Free Black University to support the Black community in ways that Leeds University has shown that they are either unwilling or unable to. The University will also recognise an ongoing commitment to supporting the work of the Free Black Uni in the radical transforming of educational practices.

18. Take the lead from Leeds’ UCU and Unison branches and make a donation of at least £50,000 to the local anti-racist organisation West Yorkshire Racial Justice Network who do invaluable work to end racial injustice and address the legacies of colonialism.

We would also recommend that the University approach them to run their ‘Unlearning Racism’ training for staff (mandatory)and students alike. We also recommend that all staff read this article by Dr Shirley Anne Tate and Dr Damien Page on ‘Whiteliness and institutional racism: hiding behind (un)conscious bias’.

We throw our full weight behind the following demands made recently by Leeds UCU, who mentioned the pay gap between white and BAME staff in their reasoning for going on strike this year, in a letter to the Vice-Chancellor on 5 June:

We very much hope that the University will start to truly listen, support and value Black folk. Too much damage has needlessly been done. We fundamentally feel we should not encourage Black students to come to an institution that is not committed to their success. Many of these demands have been made many, many times and ignored. Black folks deserve endless joy and opportunity and we hope that you will join us in building a world where that is possible.

END

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