Faced with a racist professor, why does Oxford Uni not take immediate action?

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“It’s tiring and disappointing and frankly, the faculty should do better”

Last week, a philosophy professor at Oxford University came under fire for his historical comments about black people. Nick Bostrom, in an email sent in 1996, said “black people are dumber than white people” as part of his adherence to an “uncompromising way of thinking and speaking”.

In response to the discovery of this racist email, the president of the philosophy faculty council sent an email to all undergraduate philosophy students last Friday. While the second sentence of the email reads: “I am sure you will be as appalled and upset as I am to find these comments from a member of our faculty”, it was immediately followed by the statement that the faculty has “the utmost respect for freedom of academic expression”.

As a black philosopher, this is ridiculous and I’m sick of it. For me, the declaration against racism was almost immediately undermined in order to defend freedom of expression. Of course, the faculty would go on to say that they “reject both the opinions expressed and the hateful language” and that they “totally condemn racism in all its forms”, it seems that to be explicitly racist would be going too far. However, the mere fact that the Faculty declared it respects freedom of expression before declaring that it rejects racist views tells me a lot about its priorities.

Despite this, I am not surprised by this timid reaction to racism. Racism in academia is constantly ignored, defended and rationalized. In fact, the very email that Nick Bostrom sent is an example of this trend in academia. In the 1996 email, Bostrom seems to be reveling. He “likes” the phrase and thinks it’s true, but complains that people think he’s racist (he uses quotes around the term racist in the email) because of it.

He complains that for other people the phrase “Black people are dumber than white people” is synonymous with “I hate those bloody niggers” (he of course didn’t censor the use of the n-word at a time in the original email or when he uploaded it to his website last week as part of his apology).

He thinks it is commendable to speak with “the provocation of shameless objectivity”. However, since this racism is framed in academic terms, he seems to think he gets a pass.

A screenshot of the historic email sent by Nick Bostrom

Moreover, the Faculty has still not publicly taken legal action against him. Ironically enough, this lack of swift action against racism among Faculty members is occurring at the same time as the think tank Civitas has ranked Oxford as the second most “campus wokery”.

Campus wokery is a dumb term, and the index itself is pretty dumb, but it shows that Oxford is still too wide awake for these people, even employing people it knows have racist views.

This shows how the idea that woke ideology is infecting our universities has gotten out of control. A truly woke university would take immediate action against racist comments like these, but in reality, racism is once again being spoken about in the same breath as false freedom claims. of speech.

As a black philosophy student, all of this leaves me in a strange place. To me, I feel like the department doesn’t really take racism seriously, but we’re always told about the university’s racial equality task force and that the faculty are “committed to the work of fight against racism”. The messages are mixed, there seem to be many initiatives in place to take anti-racism seriously, but faced with a fairly clear case of a racist teacher, no immediate action is taken. It’s tiring and disappointing and frankly, the faculty should do better.

A University of Oxford spokesperson said: “The University and Faculty of Philosophy are currently investigating the matter but condemn in the strongest possible terms the views expressed by this particular scholar in his communications.

Neither the content nor the language matches our strong commitment to diversity and equality.

Professor Nick Bostrom was approached for comment but did not respond. In his apology posted on his website, he said: “I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It doesn’t exactly represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repugnant. I immediately apologized for writing it back then, within 24 hours; and I apologize unreservedly again today.

Do you want to write articles like this? Do you want to discover the biggest stories on campus? The Oxford Tab is looking for new writers for this quarter Hilary and we want you! To find out how to join the team, contact us on Instagram @thetab_oxford

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Featured image before edits via Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

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