The woke university in a clinch with the Party in Beijing
While it has cancelled an alumnus over his racism report, Nottingham has embraced authoritarian China, says Jonathan Margolis
NThis distinguished university is applying double standards with a paint roller
I admit to having my own sensitivities about the patchy integrity the university is showing
ews that the chairman of the Government’s race commission, the educationalist Dr Tony Sewell, has been cancelled by his alma mater, Nottingham University, is a case of double standards when it comes to this hallowed establishment’s partnerships. The university, one of the most prestigious in Britain and the world, withdrew an honorary degree because of Dr Sewell’s report last year which concluded that although Britain is not yet a “post-racial society”, there is no evidence of institutional racism.
The university said it had retracted the honour because he had become the “subject of political controversy”.
What, after all, could the Brixtonborn son of Jamaican immigrants, possibly know about racism? Everyone is aware that middle-class white people are the correct arbiters of what is racist and what is not. People like Professor Shearer West, the BritishAmerican art historian and vicechancellor of Nottingham University.
Not only is it outrageous for a black man to fail to see racism all around him, but an educational establishment also clearly has a duty of care to young students not to expose them to any view that is contentious, unorthodox or, worst of all, unfashionable.
Or, as Dr Sewell put it better, “Universities in England are like the Soviet Union. There is no freedom of speech.” He added, “I thought the work of a university was to deal with complex issues.”
But Nottingham University’s tinpot stand against an iconoclastic academic is more than just a case of cowardice by dodging the minimal chance of offence to students who might not agree with Dr Sewell.
The bigger picture is of a distinguished university applying double standards with a paint roller. While it has shown itself to be hairspring-sensitive to students’ imagined fragility when it comes to uncomfortable ideas, Nottingham University has been locked in a loving embrace with the People’s Republic of China, of all countries, for 20 years.
They have been party to the he building of an official Nottingham gham campus in Ningbo, south of Shanghai, for Chinese students to get a Nottingham degree without the need to leave home.
The shadow campus, complete plete with a giant replica of the East Midlands dlands university’s administration building, uilding, even has a Robin Hood restaurant. urant. A replica of the Robin Hood statue tatue outside Nottingham Castle has as also been donated to the port city.
Even with a cloned Nottingham University in China, hina, however, eight per cent of students at the real Nottingham am are now mainland Chinese
– that’s just under 3,000 young ng people. A sizeable Chinese infrastructure serves them, including one of the finest Chinese restaurants in Britain, n, the excellent Shanghai Shanghai on Goose Gate. The e Durham Ox, a grotty old pub in the main student area, Beeston, at one point recently had a food menu in Mandarin only.
In contrast to its tender feelings for students affected by Tony Sewell’s counter-cultural view on racism, has the university any reasonable sensitivity at all to those who might feel bad about the Uyghurs, the repression of Hong Kong, of Tibet, of the Falun Gong or many other issues on which China is, to use diplomatic language, on a different path from us?
Nottingham University’s clinch with China may even have national security implications, according to a 2019 report from a think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It has been previously claimed that the Chinese military is benefitting from scientific work done in some British universities, including Nottingham.
When the report came out, the university responded by saying that the work being done in Nottingham on aeronautics involved only Chinese civil aircraft engines. It may be telling, however, that the university declined this week to give a breakdown of what its mainland Chinese students are studying.
But astonishingly, there is yet another Nottingham University in Malaysia – a lovely place for holidays, but also a hardline Islamic country whose prime minister until recently was a proud and vocal antiSemite – and whose population has been shown to hate Israel even more than do West Bank Palestinians.
As for hurting the sensitivities of Jewish or Israeli students, though, it would appear to be a case of, who cares? The woke fashion for feelings in our universities means some groups just aren’t on the list for offence.
I admit to having my own sensitivities about the patchy integrity Nottingham University is displaying. I was a politics student there in the 1970s. I applied because my mother’s family was evacuated to Nottingham in 1940, and I was brought up with their stories of its grittiness and friendliness, but also its architectural beauty and literary connections.
My time there left me intensely proud of my university, loving the world-class Playhouse nearby, a committed Nottingham Forest fan and, all in all, like an honorary local.
At the same time, I have visited China almost 30 times, having close friends there – and even having written sometimes in qualified support and admiration of the Chinese Communist Party’s achievements in recent decades. I once was invited for lunch at the Chinese embassy in London and treasure the memory.
In another life, I would love to have studied the beautiful Mandarin language and been either a foreign correspondent or a diplomat in Beijing.
However, the China of Xi Who Must Be Obeyed has sadly and unnecessarily lost the respect of even its most generously inclined friends. At the moment, it is a country which deserves admiration and our best attempts at civilised relations, but is not very obviously a friend. And really not a power we should be allowing to develop its military might, courtesy of our universities.
I am not at all against Chinese students being educated here. I also understand how Nottingham University has got into the ethically precarious positions it has.
Today, universities have to forge business alliances, but if they neglect to pander to the fickle fashions of young people, they lose customers. Additionally, foreign students are a life-saving source of income.
I was reporting on the story of Nottingham University opening in China back in 2004, when President Xi was a local party official. It was an optimistic time in relations between China and the West.
One Nottingham professor phoned me to report that he was watching Chinese surveyors on campus measuring up the building – and that they had told him they were planning to build the Ningbo Trent Building 50 per cent bigger than the original. Which they proceeded to do. At the time, it was rather heartwarming. With special access granted by the university, I was commissioned by Channel 4 News to film a report on the project, starting in Nottingham and then morphing to Ningbo, where viewers would see the identical, but XL-sized building, behind me. Sadly, an inconvenient typhoon stopped all flights and the project got forgotten.
It was a fun story, and seemed like a good idea to have strong links with China. What is not a good idea, though, is for a British institution to be clamping down on a fine academic like Tony Sewell, while turning a blind eye to the poor behaviour of its big-money business partners.
The University of Nottingham were contacted for comment.