Black professors fight to save jobs and Black Studies course at BCU

More than 130 international leaders in university governance, education and public policy have signed an open letter in solidarity against Birmingham City University’s (BCU) plan to end its MA in Black Studies and Global Justice.

The decision follows the university having folded its undergraduate course in Black Studies in 2024. The master’s course itself had been open for mere months before BCU made a unilateral decision to close it down.

As such, the open letter highlights that Black Studies itself is being erased and how university management are targeting Black faculty.

The only staff put at risk of potential redundancy are the only Black staff in the sociology division.

Course leader, Professor Kehinde Andrews, worked to develop the Black Studies courses and penned the open letter. He also launched a petition with the goal of saving the postgraduate course, which already has more than 3,000 signatures.

BCU’s Black staff ‘singled out for redundancy’

It’s reported that BCU decided to close the course back in February. However, course leaders were given just 24 hours’ notice for the meeting in which they were told the news.

In that meeting, they were blindsided and learnt the following:

• The decision had been taken, with no consultation from the staff team, to close the MA Black Studies and Global Justice, after less than a year of the course running

• A proposal to reduce the staff team, putting all of us at the potential risk of compulsory redundancy

As an attempted rationale for its decision, BCU highlighted the low recruitment levels on the MA. Currently, eight students are enrolled on the course. However, this excuse falls flat given that this is merely its first year of existence.

Five Black members of staff now face redundancy. Worse still, in spite of his colleagues’ expertise across the field of sociology, Andrews highlighted that BCU had selected its redundancy pool in a way that specifically impacted Black employees.

Even if the Board accepts the decision to close the MA programme, it does not logically or legally follow that permanent academic posts must be made redundant. These are separate decisions requiring separate justification…

By defining the selection pool around a single course rather than the department in which staff are contractually employed, the University has created a foreseeable and disproportionate impact on Black staff.

Three key demands from BCU staff

As an illustration of the racist nature of this redundancy selection, we can look to Andrews’ actual role. He was appointed as a professor for international leadership in research, rather than Black Studies itself. Likewise, teaching on the MA accounts for less than 10% of his time. Still, he is now up for redundancy.

It is also damning that, in spite of its claims to lead in equality, diversity, and inclusion, and a public commitment to retaining black staff, BCU hasn’t carried out an equality impact assessment before making this decision.

As such, the open letter’s signatories have made three key demands of the board of governors:

1. Direct the University Executive Team to remove the threat of compulsory redundancy and end the consultation, pending a full, legal departmental level review

2. Ensure the university undertakes meaningful engagement on retaining Black Studies content in the curriculum that is accessible across the university.

3. Ensure the university explores a distance learning MA Black Studies and Global Justice.

A broader pattern

Many UK universities are currently afflicted by financial crisis, and have begun making desperate cuts to courses.

However, Andrews highlighted that BCU’s actions fit into a broader pattern of erasure of “Black knowledge and critical education” in both the UK and the US.

He wrote:

Unfortunately, the lack of support for courses based on knowledge produced by Black communities has been glaringly absent in academia.

The high-profile closures of courses like the MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora, and redundancy of Professor Hakim Adi at the University of Chichester… are indicative of a worrying trend.

In the US there is an attack on Black intellectual thought, in the UK there is so little of it on offer in higher education that the bigger problem is neglect. When we do manage to offer such courses they should be nurtured, not stamped out at the earliest opportunity.

With fascism and the far right on the rise again, both at home and abroad, attacks on the inclusion and knowledge-production of marginalised communities are also increasing.

In making its threats against Black Studies, BCU has demonstrated that its knee-jerk reaction to financial pressure is to pass the buck to Black staff.

University management must act now to show that its commitments to EDI and Black employees were more than mere words, and that its principles will not evaporate at the first sign of a political shift.

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