Royals’ university to hire Race Tsar after abuse claims
ONE of Scotland’s top universities is to appoint a ‘Race Tsar’ after complaints of discrimination and abuse were exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
Last year, 40 students and graduates came forward to claim they had been the victims of racial abuse at St Andrews University, formerly attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
Amid their shocking testimonies, one student said they were called a ‘negro’ and another said a group of students sent her antisemitic messages mentioning Hitler and her ‘Jewish nose’.
Now The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the prestigious institution is looking for a ‘Race Equality Charter Chair’ to help deliver its ‘ambition that equality, diversity and inclusion should be at the heart of the St Andrews experience’.
An advert for the unsalaried post reads: ‘A key aspect of the role will be to understand and address the experience of people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities at all levels of the university, in order to enable the university to make meaningful interventions in respect to, for example, staff recruitment, representation, pay gaps and promotion gaps; student admissions, representation and attainment; discrimination, bullying and harassment; and curriculum reform.’
This newspaper last year laid bare a number of allegations of discriminatory behaviour at the Fife campus, made by current and former students, which appeared on an Instagram page called Hidden Voices of St Andrews.
One black student wrote that he had been called a ‘negro’, while another told how someone at the university had claimed that ‘brown people are weird with their towel hats and weird skirts’. The Mail on Sunday also told how the university was embroiled in a sex attacks scandal after 250 students and graduates claimed that they were the victims of sexual or physical abuse at the institution, including rape and stalking.
A spokesman for the university said yesterday: ‘St Andrews will be applying for Race Equality Charter status under the well-recognised Advance HE scheme, and as part of that we will be appointing a senior member of staff internally to be our academic lead on the application process.
‘The historical anonymous testimonies to which the Mail on Sunday refers (Hidden Voices) were not complaints about the way the university handles claims of racist behaviour, nor did they describe a problem which is in any way specific to St Andrews.
‘Rather they gave examples of the sort of casual racism and unconscious bias which minorities across the country still report experiencing far too often in society and in the media in general.’