Teaching at The University of the Arts Review
The world I inhabit as an academic is a white world. I am a fresh water fish that swims in a sea water feeling the weight of the water… on my body.”
Summons 1997:227
Words by Kerian Magloire
The Academic Futures event at Camberwell College was an evening of hope, a step in the right direction, it was about the UAL’s aspirations to change the culture within its universities. The event marked the launch of over 50 new academic posts seeking to specifically engage with teaching candidates from Black, Asian and (other) ethnic backgrounds, LGBTQ individuals, as well as people with disabilities (inclusive of Learning Difficulties). In collaboration with Shades of Noir, this recruitment campaign is aimed at more than dismantling gendered and racial discrimination across the UAL.
It is about the ‘accountability’ we all inherently carry by choosing education as our arena of practice.
This recruitment is also an opportunity for academics of colour to place themselves at the centre of a fast approaching biting-point in British higher education as a counter-narrative and (solution) beyond the institutionally adapted oral traditions of ‘safe space crits’. A defence mechanism responding to the endemic nature of false democracy, which for too long has been a socialist cloak, the ‘education for all’ slogan has deemed racism to be outside the domain of academia, and to be assuredly ‘above reproach’. Due to this, class, privilege and the advantages of whiteness have allowed policy and scholarship to incubate beyond scrutiny for decades despite increasingly diverse cohorts.
Studies done by the Aiming Higher research team found students of colour are less likely to be admitted to elite ‘Russell Group’ universities even when they have ‘like for like’ entry grades. The most shocking evidence of this ‘crisis of race’ in British higher education, is the dearth of senior ranking black and minority ethnic academics. In comparison to a total of 3895 white female and 12,455 white male professors in the UK, there are only 345 British women of colour professors of which 30 are Black British,10 Pakistani and 5 British Bangladeshi, with British Indian at only 80 and 75 respectively. – Arday and Mirza, n.d.
Aside from UAL’s long overdue call for academics of colour, the evening’s discussions placed ‘education’ at the centre of society’s rapidly evolving diversity and the need to reflect these changes in an already contentious admissions process.
What should art academies now look for in candidates? Also, what sort of changes are needed in curriculum design? Are students “outgrowing course structures” and conventional methods of teaching? These weighty questions are pressing now due to a combination of factors: The primary and fundamental concern is that the ‘university’ must function as the repository of our contextualised development (the human story), and must attempt to adapt to remain relevant. As societal progress may have already outgrown the structures of traditional institutionalised academies. This presents us with another challenging but pertinent question: Can’t institutions operate anywhere people want to learn about themselves and interconnected culture(s)?
Certainly virtual classrooms already exists and many modes of independent educational experiences are already happening online in spite of a mixed ability to earn and acquire recognised qualifications.
The panel, broken into two panels, featured the following speakers: Terry Finnigan, Mo-Ling, Darryl Clifton, Richard Renyolds, Angela Drisdale, Zey Suka Bill, Naomi Sadowska and Melodie Holiday. Each discussion explored various degrees of policy ‘reform’ and posited ideas for intersectional, and truly liberated approaches to teaching that would enable students from all backgrounds to engage in combat against the dominant and biased ideologies and systems of thought that shape our society. Following a short introduction from Aisha Richards (Shades of Noir Founder), Simon Ofield-Kerr (Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Academic) set the tone with a keynote address underpinned with his personal investment for institutional change. He expanded on the themes of ‘progression’, diversity and the UAL’s financial ‘action’ plan of intent, a line in the sand which acknowledges a past full of empty promises. Throughout the night, frustration and skepticism were unapologetically placed on the plates of those selected to take on UAL’s forthcoming metamorphosis.
The intensely expressed sentiments focused on the need to destabilise biased power-dynamics, promote equity, representation, and questioning whether universities are doing more harm than good. The conversation was closely reflective of the all too familiar American dilemma of racial minorities suffering from simultaneous invisibility and hyper-visibility, a condition intimately immortalised by the words of Black writers such as Ralph Ellison – American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” ― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Multiple personal narratives were laid out; accounts of microaggressions and isolation, and, in most cases, were delivered with almost undetectable cunning as a strategy to give a much needed and visceral realism to “life as an academic of colour”. Discussions which all too often routinely turn into a policy-centred interrogational merry-go-rounds. — where accountability is tossed at the doorstep of ‘past’ ignorance’ and where no real intention exists but to remove the pitchforks from the hands of those storming the gates. Where action plans merely tickle the romantic ‘idea’ of equality and change, knowing the pendulum of justice advances closer to no more than a ‘pie in the sky’ picture, than to swing back with momentous accountability.
The questions that were emphasised were, what are the roles of modern Arts Universities? And how do you (the panelist, the majority of which were course leaders, lectures etc) see the future of Higher Education changing in your field? The responses were loaded with promise and possibility, but also uncertainty, which a panel with years of combined doctoral research revised again and again. The panelists optimistically tried to offer assurances that UAL’s ecosystem and course structures could evolve beyond linear, and increasingly restrictive single-disciplinary models. Narrow academic modes of education that drives institutionalised norms along with a welcome message to newcomers which reads: “leave your personality at the door bumpkin”. Promising nothing but the ‘potentiality’ of marginal capitalist success to a select few; more often than not, they are white and male.
So what makes this initiative so different?
Though this move towards integration cannot hope to offer a cure for the complex ‘culture’ of racism inside academia it is, potentially a portent of progress. Within the UK, the UAL is alone among educational institutions taking this step, and making the financial investment in diversifying. The fact that an academic community-ranked second in the Art and Design QS World Rankings is publicly making this commitment is certainly a positive sign of “pushing a 35-year-old conversation forward.” (Simon Ofield-Kerr) Most importantly, however, it will enrich the lives of present and future students of all backgrounds and communities.
Bibliography
Arday, J. and Mirza, H. (n.d.). Dismantling Race in Higher Education.
[Image] Academic Futures Poster, courtesy of UAL
