Cambridge’s ‘reverse mentoring’ scheme was always going to fail

Institutional racism is rife at Cambridge university – that was the assumption behind the university’s ‘reverse-mentoring’ scheme which was launched to much fanfare last summer. The idea was simple enough: senior academics who were white would be educated about racism by their BAME colleagues.

But the news that the scheme may be scrapped after its short pilot is hardly a surprise. As I wrote back in July, the singling out of white colleagues for mentoring is flawed on many counts. Worst of all, it embraces the increasingly popular belief that racism is an unconscious state of being that is inexorably inherent in some (but not all) racial groups.

This is not, however, the reason why the scheme might be shelved. According to Joanna Jasiewicz, an equality and diversity consultant at the university, some BAME staff who were asked to mentor their white colleagues found participating in the scheme to be ‘yet another burden’.

Jasiewicz put this down to the fact that the BAME mentors were uneasy with the emotional labour involved in helping senior white staff better understand racism while Cambridge academic Dr Priyamvada Gopal blamed ‘a culture of not taking race seriously’.

The apathy of those taking part could not be more clear. Had the BAME mentors uncovered genuine racism in their colleagues, they surely would have been more inclined to continue taking part. Could it be that the scheme floundered because neither the BAME members of staff nor their colleagues could see the point of the mentoring? Perhaps Cambridge is less racist than people with job titles like ‘equality and diversity consultant’ would care to admit.

An industry has grown up around the fight against racism both in the education sector and in the business world – people’s jobs, livelihoods and research grants now depend on there being a racism problem to solve. If the issue is revealed to be less severe than was previously implied then it is very difficult for these professionals to say so outright. To do so would be to undermine their own purpose.

Instead, the failures of schemes such as this one must be dressed up in the emotive language of ‘burden’ and, of course, the blame for the failure has to be laid squarely at the door of the white academics.

Cambridge’s concept of ‘reverse mentoring’ was founded on spurious grounds from the off: it was launched in response to a complaint against a Cambridge academic who ‘had repeatedly read out the n-word during class discussions’. That an academic can be guilty of racism simply because they have recited the words of others, regardless of the context, should be of concern to all those who care about intellectual freedom in our universities. Cambridge’s response should have been an objective assessment of the facts – not a kneejerk initiative built on the assumption that most of its senior staff are closet racists.

As I predicted in July, the reverse mentoring scheme will come to an end, not because academics squared up to the need to protect freedom of speech, but because of yet another layer of political correctness: Joanna Jasiewicz’s remarks imply that it is wrong to ask BAME staff to take on the burden of tackling institutional racism. Nobody – from Jasiewicz to the university – has stopped to ask the question of whether the scheme was even needed in the first place. To do so would undermine the prevailing assumptions of campus life: the mantra that white academics teach and speak from a position of inherent bias even if there’s no concrete evidence that this is indeed the case.

There’s a danger that those striving for equality on campus shoot themselves in the foot. The more liberally the term racism is applied, the more difficult it becomes to highlight genuine cases of discrimination amid the clamour of accusations.

The Cambridge scheme was clearly met with a lacklustre response by both the BAME mentors and the white mentees. It would be easy for Cambridge to put this poor engagement down to a need for further re-education. The braver alternative might be to ask whether staff, regardless of their racial background, see this growing obsession with race relations as an unnecessary distraction from their studies. Academics don’t want to be considering the race of their colleagues in their every professional interaction. They are there to cultivate and exchange ideas. It’s high time we left them to do just that.