’I also wanted to be part of efforts to positively transform the faculty, and was a member of both the Staff Student Decolonization Working Group and the Decolonize PhD Reading Group. Although I admire those involved in these groups, unfortunately I ultimately ended up feeling deeply pessimistic about the potential of making any real change in the faculty. We often got stuck on piecemeal, conciliatory, and even counterproductive demands, I think because anything more felt like an impossibility.
For me, the final straw came when the AHRC DTP invited
a Ghanaian scholar, Akosua Adomako Ampofo, to deliver its annual lecture. The talk Prof. Ampofo gave was a lucid and straightforward analysis of the way racism — and particularly anti-blackness and anti-African prejudice — function in academia. Yet in his introduction and moderation, the director of the DTP kept calling her talk controversial and provocative, adding that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
This method of veiling racism through a performance of faux humility and bumbling foolishness, which is something of a tradition among the British elite classes, served to undermine the simple and important point Prof. Ampofo was making. It was yet another example of the university appearing to take one step forward only to take two steps back.
Taken in isolation, none of these incidents might seem dramatic enough to push me to leave the rare privilege of a fully-funded PhD position at what is theoretically one of the best universities in the world. Yet the ubiquity of such incidents is actually far more indicative of a suffocating and intellectually degraded environment than any single, spectacular event.
I believe that the pervasive presence of racism at Cambridge damages and delegitimises the institution, and I do not want to participate in re-legitimising it by contributing my time, effort, and skills as a member of the university.’
