Student-led campaigns have been calling out racism in universities for years. After a shocking incident at Nottingham Trent University, perhaps we should start to listen.
If it’s ok to use research carried out in unethical experiments – as long as we acknowledge they were wrong – is it ok to keep a statue of an infamous imperialist?
Rhodes was an ardent white supremacist who believed Africans to be inferior. He intended his scholarships to be for white males only. This has since fallen away.
The university should be the bastion of the right to free expression in the promotion of democracy, and has a moral and ethical obligation to provide spaces for fierce debate and critical engagement.
How can the higher education sector guard against proposed transformation measures being merely superficial quick fixes? At least part of the answer may lie in institutional governance.