In the second incident, an academic at Leeds University was suspended pending an enquiry following his having made remarks to the effect that black people were not as intelligent as white people. An academic from Lancaster University then wrotethat this response was inappropriate; a more appropriate response in an academic context, he felt, would have been to engage with the argument made and to refute it rather than silence it.
Both of these incidents raise interesting points to consider in our own context. In the first, much of the debate has centred around the context rather than the content. The fact that the racist taunts were made in the playground where, it has been argued, children routinely fix upon some identified weakness or perceived negative characteristic of each other to generate unflattering nicknames like "fatso" or "four-eyes" is seen as exonerating it from the ambit of societal norms and, indeed, the rule of law. These are children, the argument has been proffered, the response is disproportional. And, as has been pointed out, racism is not illegal - although the usage of racist insults is.
In the second, the Lancaster academic falls back on the ethos of Universities, and on notions of academic freedom, to argue for a collegial response of refutation rather than a managerialist response of censure. In his piece, he argues that the racist opinions were expressed in a subject matter outside of the offender's field of expertise, were expressed outside of the classroom, and were manifest verbally as opinion rather than through discriminatory practice, such as marking black students more harshly than white students. Being a University, it was argued, mechanisms other than suspension exist for dealing with matters such as this. Debate and refutation being the preferred one.
Different as these two incidents are, they - and the debates around them - demonstrate some notion of educational exceptionalism: that these incidents should not provoke some heavy-handed response, because they took place in contexts of education (albeit not in the classroom). There is an expectation that, because of some proximity to the educational project, the severity of these incidents becomes diluted; or that the presence of braincells nearby somehow causes all in the vicinity to exercise sober, reflexive judgment and realise how inane and unworthy of serious consideration racist opinion (and epithet) is and thus how unworthy of further expense of time or action, in response.
As if. As if the impact, and the import, of these incidents begins and ends there. As if the educational sphere exists somehow separately from the Universe in which it finds itself, and as if somehow it does not talk to power outside, or even within, this sphere.
Whose interests are protected in not conveying to an 11 year old that their racist actions are serious, and have consequences that reverberate beyond the playground? Whose interests are served by not signalling to the racist lecturer that their racist utterances are serious, and have consequences that reverberate beyond the tearooms of academe? And whose interests are served in maintaining that education is somehow in the world but not of it, above and beyond the reach of mores and laws and systems of recourse?