When students enter the panelled halls of Cambridge university’s Jesus College for this year’s autumn term, they will find a new “master”: Sonita Alleyne.
According to the college founded in 1496, the Barbados-born businesswoman will bring an “enduring commitment to helping young people fulfil their potential” as well as a focus on “diversity and inclusivity”.
Pointedly, the college chose not to draw attention to the most salient aspect of Ms Alleyne’s selection. She will be the first black head of a college at Oxbridge, the collective term for Oxford and Cambridge, the UK’s most prestigious universities.
For some, this and other recent initiatives at central university level are typical of a belated and inadequate approach that the two universities have taken to improve diversity. There is still no black British professor with tenure at Cambridge, according to the staff union, and black British students made up less than 2 per cent of incoming undergraduates in 2017.
For others though, these are hopeful signs that Cambridge is finally trying to refashion its reputation as a bastion of white privilege.
“It’s significant as an overdue first,” conceded Priyamvada Gopal, who has been one of the most outspoken of the university’s staff on matters of race. Ms Gopal, a professor of English literature at Churchill College, is otherwise steadfast in her critique of Cambridge’s record in confronting what she considers institutionalised racial bias.
A two-year investigation into the university’s links with the slave trade announced last month by Stephen Toope, the vice-chancellor, represented a “limited start”, she said. But it risked falling prey to the same structural problem that had weakened other attempts to redress the racial balance, the professor added. This is because Cambridge, like Oxford, is a strongly decentralised institution and its 31 semi-autonomous colleges are under no obligation to co-operate. So far only King’s College has said it will.
“To leave the colleges out of the inquiry is dishonest because the institutional wealth is and was in the colleges,” Ms Gopal said. “If you are not going to look there, this is a lame-duck inquiry.”
She and other academics said the same federalised system dogged other initiatives, including those driven by a proactive admission’s department.
Among recent measures, Sam Lucy, Cambridge’s head of admissions, listed outreach programmes to state schools in deprived areas, a shift in the way interviews are conducted to take student backgrounds into account, and a willingness to listen to the experiences of black and minority ethnicity (BME) students.
But critics say such piecemeal initiatives are insufficient to drag Oxbridge into the 21st century. They advocate a more mandatory approach to enforce compliance by the colleges.
“It’s not with voluntary activities that you will fundamentally change practices,” said Manali Desai, a sociology professor active in the staff union. “You need more teeth in equality and diversity strategies.”
The data tend to back her up. Last year, a freedom of information request by Cambridge graduate Rianna Croxford found that white British applicants were twice as likely to be admitted as their black peers.
Moreover, daily life can be alienating for BME and disadvantaged students who do make it. One black MA graduate from a low-income family said she was treated like an “experiment”, often questioned about how she got in, and startled by the white-centric nature of the curriculum. She was also stressed by the constant need for more money since she said her scholarship was insufficient.
“This space is beautifully backwards in its conversation around race and gender,” she said.
The slavery inquiry came about partly because of student agitation. Many black students feel that an investigation into Cambridge’s complicity with slavery is a necessary historical reckoning — although there has been a backlash to the inquiry in its current form.
Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the UK’s Human Rights Commission, called it “virtue signalling on steroids”. Gilian Evans, professor of medieval theology at Cambridge, described it as a “dangerous” example of “a fashionable social and political concern” guiding the way history is read.
Some student activists are disappointed by the inquiry’s restricted scope, if convinced by the underlying need for it.
“The issues — slavery, the construction of racial ideologies and the current shortage of BME students — are actually a single problem. You cannot tackle one adequately without addressing the other,” said one African PhD student who requested anonymity.
One more hopeful sign is that she, like many black Cambridge students are lobbying to ensure future generations have a better time.
“There are many moments in which it becomes evident that the university was not designed with you in mind,” said Surer Mohamed, who runs the Black Cantabs research society, which is recording the achievements of black Cambridge alumni. “But there is fantastic work by students and faculty alike to try to address this,” she said.
Toni Fola-Alade, a politics and international studies undergraduate and former president of the Afro-Caribbean society, said issues of racial exclusion were little different at Cambridge than in British society at large. He said it was beholden on those black students at the university to make the most of their experience, given the privileged influence historically bestowed on Oxbridge graduates.
“What we do here matters well beyond the metaphorical four walls of the university. It has to be symbolic of greater shifts of society in general,” said Mr Fola-Alade, who sat on the committee that set up the slave trade inquiry. He added that it was important to focus more on what black students contribute than on the limitations they face.
“The university is beginning to take on these concerns.”
Still, these are early days. Last month, the university was surprised to find that black school children listed an absence of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers among deterrents for applying to the university. That was not, as some implied, an indication that they were obsessed by their hair, but rather an expression of fear that they were not welcome at Cambridge.
Even here there is progress — of sorts. As well as one black master, Cambridge now has one black hairdresser too.
