In 2006, Dr Frank Ellis, who taught Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, was suspended from his post as lecturer after he told a student newspaper that he supported the theory that Black people were less intelligent than white people. In the pages of the Guardian at the time, he was described as a “lecturer who insisted that black people and women were genetically inferior”. This was six years after his views first received national coverage.
When I saw Ellis’s views make it to the national press, I felt angry. I had known Ellis was a racist because when I was a student of Russian studies between 1996 and 2000, he taught many of my classes and I had to endure hearing his views on a regular basis. He would regularly tell us that nothing good had ever come out of Africa, and he would share how he wrote for white supremacist publications and attended conferences in the US alongside members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The majority studying in the department were young women, and a few of us were of African descent. Some classmates and I raised concerns within the department at the time, but nothing was ever done: his “freedom” of speech was something we had to just accept. Years after we left Leeds, a group of us felt so strongly about what we had experienced – and the university’s failure in its duty of care – that we wrote a letter about it.
I have been transported back to those Leeds seminar rooms after reading of the decision of Oriel College at the University of Oxford to allow Dr Nathan Cofnas to speak at an event organised by Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, a student group that supports Reform UK. Much like Ellis, Cofnas has persistently espoused views associated with scientific racism.
A blogpost published by Cofnas while he worked at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, claimed that “in a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%” and that Black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”. Though Cofnas’s right to his views were upheld by a tribunal, it found that the blogpost “created a hostile, intimidating, unwelcoming and degrading environment for members of the college, particularly black students”. Cofnas’s claims against Prof Jason Arday also led to the professor facing intense media scrutiny in the runup to his death.
For me, this story is a painful and sobering reminder that little has changed when it comes to universities’ care for their students, particularly Black students. In a statement regarding the Cofnas event, Oriel College said that the institution is “committed to upholding freedom of speech within the law and has a statutory duty to do so. This includes the freedom to express views that many find deeply offensive.”
Perhaps the argument that platforming racist ideas is merely a “freedom of expression” issue persists because of a disconnect with the real experience of Black students – and faculty – who have to navigate university campuses under such circumstances. Nearly three decades on, I can still remember preparing myself for tutorials with Ellis. Trying to defend my right to exist, to be in that space. And I wasn’t the only one. Rehearsing arguments, sharpening comebacks, compiling data. Anything I could do to try to push back at whatever derogatory comment he would slip into his lecture.
I was brought up to be conscious, proud of my heritage and culture. Maybe I landed a blow or two, but the upshot was that it was exhausting. It was never enough. I was never going to change his mind, but I was not mature enough to realise that. And it chip, chip, chipped away at me, my self-esteem, my emotional wellbeing. At a time when I should have felt liberated, encouraged – and, yes, challenged – to explore, interrogate, critically analyse, I was being pushed into a box. The message was clear: know your place, Ebony.
Advocates of free speech may think that what I endured was OK, and similarly that Black and global-majority students at Oxford must simply suck it up with regard to Cofnas. But as a young Black woman on the receiving end of anti-Black as well as misogynistic speech from a person who had power over me, it felt like abuse.
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And as for Oxford, while freedom of speech is indeed a fundamental human right, it also sits alongside an obligation, according to the UN, to “ensure the equal and non-discriminatory participation of all individuals in public life”. This means that universities must balance academic freedom with their duties under UK equality legislation.
It may be that Oriel College has considered both these obligations and done the necessary equality analysis, in which case it should share it transparently with students, academics and high-profile figures who have raised legitimate concerns. But otherwise, this just looks like yet another case of disregarding the safety of Black people who simply want to study, work and live their lives without their intelligence being questioned.
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Ebony Riddell Bamber is the programme director of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement programme
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