UK’s first black university is ‘illegitimate and harmful’

BRITAIN’S first “black university”, which includes a course on “burning s--- down”, does not have permission to use an official university title, it has emerged.

The Free Black University was created by Mel Owusu, a PhD researcher at Cambridge, amid the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and is now starting to take on students.

Mr Owusu has said it is needed because British universities are “built on colonisation – the money, buildings, architecture – everything is colonial”.

Having crowdfunded £150,000, the organisation is running its first course titled the “radical imagination labs”, fully funded for 16 students.

The course only accepted applications from “people racialised as Black or mixed-Black”, with students challenged at a “revolutionary level” because “we are living in the imagination of a few White European men”.

In the 10-week course, week two is titled “burn s*** down”, which focuses on “building abolitionist futures” and going “beyond the realm of mind and into the parts of self that the ‘Eurocentric masculinist knowledge validation process’...would not accept as truth”.

It has been publicly supported by the University and College Union, the UK’s biggest academics union, and the National Union of Students.

However, the universities watchdog has revealed it has not been given permission to use an official university title.

Susan Lapworth, of the Office for Students, said: “Organisations are not permitted to use the legally protected term ‘university’ in their name without permission and we have not been asked for permission in this case.”

Inaya Folarin Iman, head of the Equiano Project, said: “Far from supporting black students, it harms them by forwarding an anti-educational, anti-science, grievance-based politics. Racialism and segregation is being promoted in the name of anti-racism.”

The Free Black University did not respond to requests for comment.