10 June 2021

Dear members of the University of Sussex Executive Group,

On 15 June 2020, the University of Sussex issued its Black Lives Matter statement, closing with the following words: “If there was ever a time for a great university to stand on the sidelines, this isn’t it”.  

Almost one year later, we write as a broad collective of students, staff, alumni and friends of the University, to express our dismay at University leadership’s continuing stance not only on the sidelines, but also in the active obstruction of racial justice work at Sussex.

Vice Chancellor Adam Tickell and former Provost Saul Becker wrote that “we have to recognise uncomfortable truths in our own university,” promising that the University leadership would start the work of “identifying and challenging the structural, cultural and other barriers, practices and discourses to achieving racial justice and equality within our institution”. They finally reiterated that “this will require difficult conversations and critical self-reflection for all of us in the months and years ahead, in order to create a University we can be proud of.” Nearly a year later, we have seen little evidence of this critical self-reflection, and even less action arising from it.

Nonetheless, it is in this ‘critical self-reflexive’ spirit that we invite the University Executive Group (UEG) to recognise some uncomfortable truths about its failure to promote racial justice at Sussex. Below, we highlight the University leadership’s broken promises and acknowledge the grassroots racial justice work being undertaken within the University community in spite of the UEG’s neglect. We end with a call for the UEG to listen to, and learn from, students and staff, such that it might take meaningful action towards anti-racist change in our University.

Broken promises

(1) Standing on the sidelines

The University leadership has failed to respond to recent calls, from within and outside its community, for it to take a strong and public position against systemic racism.

On 3 June 2020, students at Sussex wrote a powerful open letter to VC Tickell pointing out the UEG’s lack of public stance against anti-Black racism. This letter was signed by close to 1,500 people, yet received no direct response from Vice Chancellor Tickell. The VC did publish a BLM statement on 15 June, but this does not constitute a meaningful response to all those Sussex students who took the moral initiative by writing to him directly, urging the University to take an immediate and strong stance behind social mobilisations for Black lives.

A similarly belated and insubstantial gesture was taken by the University leadership in response to the UK government’s publication of the Sewell Report (The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report) on 31 March 2021. On 20 April 2021, almost three weeks after this report’s publication and its immediate and widespread condemnation, and only after express urging by Sussex UCU’s negotiating team, the University leadership issued a short statement reaffirming its commitment to tackling race inequalities. This statement notes, but does not take a position against, the Sewell Report, a document that has been characterised by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent as “an attempt to normalize white supremacy despite considerable research and evidence of institutional racism”.

The University's own Centre for International Education has produced, quite independently of the UEG, a thorough response to the Sewell Report in which it concludes: "We therefore reject the report on empirical, conceptual and ethical grounds. It offers a distorted and harmful perspective of racism in the UK. [...] And its lack of belief in you, as students and as young people, is in direct opposition to the central hope of education - that students will one day overcome the failings of their teachers." Why can the UEG not conclude the same?

If the University of Sussex is to enact its institutional commitments to racial justice, it ought to start by following experts within its own faculty in publicly rejecting a report which cites dubious evidence to deny the very existence of institutional racism. In failing to take a strong stance on this issue, the University has failed its students and staff.

(2) Defunding student anti-racist initiatives

While Sussex management claims to be funding race equality work, it is in fact defunding it.

Through the student-led REA (Race Equity Advocate) scheme, managed and run through the Students’ Union (USSU), students at Sussex have been building a movement for race equality in their place of education. Nonetheless, for the academic year 2021-22, funding to this scheme has been cut, and its vital work transferred entirely to the institution-led Student Connectors programme.

This move co-opts, erases and disempowers the anti-racist work done by the REAs. Folding the student-led REA programme into the institution-led Connectors programme removes independent critique of University structures, disrupts continuity from previous years’ work, and sends the message that the University is not listening to its students. The REAs are an important source of transparency and accountability for the University's race equality work. Not only should this work receive continued funding, then, but also its oversight should remain within the USSU, which has a proven track record of delivering race equality work and can ensure the independence of student-led programmes.

If the University leadership truly wishes to recognise uncomfortable truths about its institutional structures, it should not be narrowing the scope of student-led racial justice work, or attempting to co-opt it.

(3) Normalising police presence on campus

Alongside pursuing its plans to defund critical, student-led anti-racism work at Sussex, the University leadership continues to put Black students, students of colour and migrant members of our University community at risk by normalising the presence of police on our campus.

During the academic year 2020-21, there were several occasions when police were invited to campus and, as a direct consequence, students were placed at risk. This included not only some disturbing accounts of police officers bursting into students’ rooms in campus accommodation in November 2020, but also the apparent violent arrest of at least one student on campus in Spring 2021. In response, the campus trade and students’ unions issued two statements.

The first statement (6 November 2020) set out the reasons why increasing the physical presence of police on campus is deeply unnerving and troubling for many, particularly in light of ongoing and serious systemic issues with police racism and violence, exposed anew by recent Black Lives Matter protests across the UK.

Four months later, the second joint statement responded to video footage appearing to show the violent arrest of a student on campus. That statement, (31 March 2021) reiterated student and staff calls for the University leadership to reconsider its position on police on campus. This statement has led to some meetings between UEG members, those responsible for campus security, the USSU and the police. But there are still concerns about the surveillance of students on campus by Sussex Police and police presence on campus long term.

We call for University leadership to remember its own words, published on 15 June 2020, that: “‘whilst we are right to call for accountability and justice where Black people die prematurely after encounters with the police, it is our responsibility as a university to be clear that there can be no neutral ground towards racist practices wherever they are found, including in our own institution.”

In the light of these words, we categorically refuse the normalisation of police presence on campus and urge the UEG to work instead with groups within the University to develop forms of community-led safety.

(4) Marginalisation of Black and Global Majority staff *

As of 2021, 75% of staff at Sussex are white, with Black staff making up only 2% of academic roles. University leadership has committed to “increasing the representation of colleagues who identify as BAME in the staff population and in improving the number of BAME staff in senior roles”. Recent decisions made by the UEG, though, have deepened the entrenchment of whiteness as the norm at Sussex.

On 25 March 2020, the UEG announced a recruitment freeze meaning that little can currently be done to address the striking lack of diversity amongst staff. Moreover, an Equalities Impact Assessment on the 2019-20 promotions freeze for academic staff shows that BAME staff were disproportionately disadvantaged by not backdating promotions pay. When asked by UCU negotiators what mitigating action would be taken to address this loss of earnings and to support BAME staff in the future, given racial pay gaps accrue over the course of a working lifetime, the UEG justified its decision not to backdate pay as a ‘purely financial’ one, and mentioned future efforts to encourage promotions applications from BAME staff.

To imagine that financial decisions bear no relation to structural inequalities, to invoke a logic of finance in securing existing racial economic inequities, and to understand race equity work as something that can happen only when finances permit, is precisely what is meant by institutional racism.

Beyond questions of recruitment and promotion, current staff of colour need more support than the UEG seems prepared to give. In the most recent staff survey, white British staff score better in all categories, including inclusion and well-being, than the average score across all nationalities, ethnicities and races. The institution-wide action plan ignores this stark finding, focussing instead on the visibility of UEG, the transparency of their decision making, and the reporting of bullying (rather than on bullying itself).

Finally, the University’s BAME Staff Network was in effect disbanded in 2020 due to a lack of institutional support. In contrast to Sussex management’s attempt to co-opt students' anti-racist work, the management of the BAME Staff Network has not been adequately resourced to begin with. We understand that the UEG will soon receive proposals that proper resources should be allocated to those running the various University staff networks, including the BAME network, and we urge UEG to accept and enact the substance of these proposals immediately.

* We acknowledge the important debate around appropriate terminology here; we have used ‘Black and Global Majority’ in this case but for the sake of clarity we use ‘BAME’ where it relates to institutional data and imperatives.

Racial Justice Work at Sussex

The above points are only four of the more recent instances of the University’s leadership’s broken promises in the area of racial justice. These instances are embedded in longer-standing, deeply entrenched obstructions to racial justice at our University, including but by no means limited to: the poor treatment of international students that formed part of the UEG’s cost-cutting response to the Covid-19 crisis; BAME attainment gaps; and the UEG’s acceptance of the current anti-Muslim and xenophobic programmes operating in UK Higher Education via the Prevent agenda and the hostile environment.

Tireless - and often unrecognised - racial justice work is being undertaken by students and staff across the University, though. This work needs to be acknowledged, celebrated and supported, and its lessons put into practice by the UEG. To name just a few examples of work giving momentum to anti-racist change at Sussex: the student-led activities of Decolonise Sussex and SARA (Sussex Anti-Racist Action); the Sussex trade unions’ Anti-Racism Working Group; recent research events by Sussex staff articulating support for global solidarity movements including those on British border violence and citizenship deprivation in the case of Shamima Begum, on identity, resilience and hope in Palestinian Higher Education and, in collaboration with QMUL, on anti-racist Internationalism and the Global colour line. As a first but partial step in the right direction, the University’s own Race Equality Charter (REC) Self Assessment Team has also been established to use “an anti-racist lens to tackle institutional racism and racial inequality”.

With all this grassroots and institutional work taking place around the University, why won’t the University leadership listen to the calls and build on the community-led work of its students and staff? We are left wondering whether the current leadership feels threatened by anti-racist work and critiques driven by students and staff at Sussex.

Our Demands

If the UEG truly wishes to create an environment where Black lives matter, where the lives of people of colour matter, and where migrant lives matter, then it could do no better than listen to the repeated calls of its students and staff, and take action on the following fronts:

1. Reinstate and increase, with immediate effect, funding for the independent USSU Race Equity Advocate scheme, and guarantee the future of this scheme alongside, and not co-opted into, the Student Connectors programme. The presence of the REA programme should be ensured in all 12 schools at this University.

2. Commit that police will not again be invited to patrol campus and that police presence on campus will not be normalised, and instead work with student and staff groups within the University to develop forms of community-led safety.

3. Lift the recruitment freeze, redress the loss of earnings represented in the promotions freeze, and take meaningful steps to ensure the University enshrines an anti-racist approach to staff recruitment and promotion processes.

4. Ring-fence funding and proper resourcing for the revival of the Sussex BAME Staff Network.

5. Invest greater time and resources not only in the institutional Race Equality Charter exercise, but first and foremost in community-led programmes for racial justice, an exemplary case being the SARA Manifesto. This manifesto has already, thoroughly and convincingly, delivered to the University leadership the ‘uncomfortable truths’ it called for in its now-inoperative BLM statement of last year.

6. Commit to anti-racism training for all members of the UEG.

If, as VC Tickell and Provost Becker wrote on 15 June 2020, “Sussex has tried since its foundation to contribute to creating a better world,” then the UEG must now be led by its students and staff who are calling for a return to the foundational principles of our University.

We call now not for the creation of further empty promises, but for the fearless fulfilment of commitments to anti-racist change in our institution. It is time for the University leadership to get off the sidelines and to stop obstructing racial justice at Sussex. We hope to see a public response published to this letter, setting out the ways in which our six demands will be met.

This letter was written by a broad coalition of staff and students currently working and learning at University of Sussex with a commitment to anti-racist action. We invite all current and former members of the Sussex community to sign and share.

SIGNATORIES