Universities must move beyond symbolic commitments to diversity and confront the institutional structures, knowledge systems and academic practices that continue to reproduce racial inequality, scholars have argued.

The call came at the latest edition of the Toyin Falola Interview, held on Sunday under the theme, “Jason Arday and Race in the Academy.” Chaired by Professor Toyin Falola, the international conversation drew scholars from Britain, the United States, South Africa and other parts of the world, with more than 20 million participants from 37 countries joining through various online platforms.

The discussion brought together scholars whose research and professional experiences have engaged different dimensions of race, colonialism and inequality in higher education. Among them was Professor Alan Lester, a historical geographer at the University of Sussex known for his work on British colonialism and its enduring legacies. He was joined by Professor Christine Vogt-William, a literary and cultural studies scholar whose research spans gender, postcolonialism, decolonial studies and critical diversity.

Also on the panel was Professor Vivek “Vik” Bahl, a US-based scholar with extensive experience in higher education and a co-founder of several diversity initiatives. Professor Shose Kessi, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town and a political psychologist, brought to the discussion her work on race, power and institutional transformation, while Dr Sabelo Mcinziba, an interdisciplinary researcher, contributed perspectives on power, knowledge, violence, identity and freedom.

Professor Alan Lester opened the discussion by placing the controversy surrounding the late Professor Jason Arday within a wider history of racial exclusion and attempts to delegitimise Black intellectuals in the academy.

Lester, a specialist in British colonialism and its afterlives, said Arday had been subjected to intense scrutiny while broader networks seeking to undermine Black scholars had escaped adequate examination.

“Jason Arday was made to feel the burden of responsibility from all sides,” Lester said. “He was positioned first as a pioneer by Cambridge and then as a symbol of hated supposed DEI or EDI policies by those who were out to get him.”

He argued that the hostility directed at Arday could not be separated from longer-running efforts to question the intellectual legitimacy of Black academics.

“Before this network had even heard of Jason Arday though, they were already trying to get black scholars out of the academy,” he said, adding that such groups were driven by the belief that Black people were “not entitled to be there by virtue of generally inferior intellects.”

According to Lester, the problem was sustained by attempts to present historically produced racial inequalities as the consequence of supposedly objective biological differences. He said the networks involved were “obsessed with the relationship between so-called race, their categorization of race, and IQ” and sought to attribute Western intellectual dominance to white superiority rather than to “400 years of colonial extraction and enslavement and other structural economic and social processes.”

Lester maintained that universities must therefore examine their own historical and contemporary role in the production and legitimisation of racial ideas rather than treating racism simply as an external social problem.

Professor Christine Vogt-William, a literary and cultural studies scholar whose research engages postcolonial and decolonial theory and critical diversity in higher education, called for universities to take institutional responsibility for confronting racism rather than reducing diversity to representation.

Reflecting on Arday’s death and the continuing challenges faced by Black academics, Vogt-William said, “I propose that we mobilize our grief and our anger in ways to address the coloniality of race as it operates in academic spaces.”

She rejected the idea that universities had entered a post-racial era, arguing that racial discrimination remained embedded in academic cultures and institutional practices.

“It is evident that we are in no shape or form in the post-racial times,” she said.

Vogt-William further drew attention to the pressure placed on Black and minority ethnic academics, including what she described as “invisibility and hyper-surveillance by both staff and students, with errors being exaggerated and exploited, and praise being reduced to fortuitous episodes or occurrences.”

She argued that the persistence of such conditions required universities to move beyond statements of commitment and undertake substantive institutional intervention.

“The enduring nature of racial discrimination within the academy shows minimal signs of relenting unless senior university stakeholders and policy makers actively attempt to disrupt these cultures with penetrative interventions,” she said.

She also criticised universities for reducing diversity, equity and inclusion to superficial institutional exercises.

“DEI is practiced at surface level as box-ticking exercises to benefit institutions in terms of public representation, feel-good politics, and access to funding without actually recognizing the coloniality of power operating in matters of racial and gender and other modes of discrimination,” Vogt-William said.

She argued that the problem extended to the treatment of knowledge produced by Black scholars and scholars from the Global South, noting that such scholarship was frequently dismissed as overly ideological or disruptive.

“The question of academic hospitality extends to the receptiveness of institutions for critique from black scholars and scholars of color in pointing out systemic injustices which will not serve institutions well in the long run,” she said.

Professor Vivek “Vik” Bahl, a US-based scholar with nearly three decades of experience in the community and technical college system, argued that universities and other higher education institutions must recognise the grassroots struggles that produced many of the diversity initiatives now being institutionalised.

Bahl distinguished between what he called “DEI from above” and “DEI from below”, warning that institutions could appropriate grassroots movements while obscuring the struggles that created them.

“DEI as a category is already an institutional category and it doesn’t adequately account for the long histories of struggle of communities of color, indigenous communities in order for them to have a foothold in higher education,” he said.

He said many successful diversity initiatives had not originated with university administrations but with students, staff and faculty who organised to challenge exclusionary structures.

“Every one of these emerges first as a grassroots, horizontal, ground-up entity and initiative,” Bahl said.

He cited efforts to reform hiring practices in Washington State’s community college system, where activists examined “the power, the lines of power and authority that governed how positions were created, who had some say” and who could influence appointments.

Bahl said such approaches were necessary because simplistic interventions, such as anti-bias training, could not by themselves transform institutional structures.

“We very much wanted to have a more robust framework and also to empower people within our institutions to actually participate in the hiring process,” he said.

Connecting this history to Arday’s appointment at Cambridge, Bahl noted that graduate students had earlier demanded greater faculty diversity, influencing the processes through which Arday was eventually appointed.

“Even his hiring didn’t just emerge without a history of struggle,” he said.

He warned that as formal DEI structures are dismantled in some institutions, universities should not assume that the movements behind them will disappear.

“The movements that created those official DEI programs came in from unofficial movements,” Bahl said. “They came from our own histories of struggle, our own genius, our own collective analysis, our own ability to create space, to develop relationships and to develop shared analysis.”

He therefore urged scholars and communities to sustain organising efforts even when formal institutional structures are weakened, stressing that “our opportunities for ongoing organizing remain what they’ve always been, whether inside higher education or in terms of the interface between higher education and communities.”

Professor Shose Kessi, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town and a political psychologist whose work examines identity, institutional reform and social change, brought the discussion to the everyday experiences of Black students and academics within historically white universities.

Drawing on research at the University of Cape Town, Kessi said Black students had reported institutional racism through Eurocentric curricula, additional scrutiny in assessment, exclusion from group work, segregated institutional spaces and pressure to conform linguistically.

“They talked about the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum,” she said, explaining that students felt their lives and experiences were not represented in the materials they were required to study.

She added that students reported “additional scrutiny that they faced in assessment practices”, including situations where their academic success was treated with suspicion.

Kessi said these experiences extended beyond students to Black academics, who could face excessive teaching loads, inadequate research resources, heightened scrutiny and barriers to promotion.

“They often speak about being overloaded with large undergraduate classes in comparison to their colleagues, not having access to resources for research, being overly scrutinized in financial management of their research funds, being overwhelmingly the targets of disciplinary processes, being denied promotion, and the list goes on and on,” she said.

She stressed that the problem was not necessarily confined to explicitly discriminatory policies but could arise through the uneven application of apparently neutral rules.

“This is not to say that university policies are explicitly discriminatory, but it’s in how they are applied and how they are unevenly applied in practice,” Kessi said.

For her, the central challenge was that universities could adopt diversity policies while leaving the underlying structures of inequality intact.

“The effects of these kinds of individualistic affirmative action or DEI models is that they blame the individual and absolve institutions from structural change,” she said.

Kessi also directly linked institutional racism to the production of knowledge, arguing that universities had historically participated in the development of scientific ideas used to justify racial hierarchy.

“Dismantling institutional racism is not only about changing demographic profiles,” she said. “Institutional racism is deeply intertwined with the ways in which universities are complicit in its very production, in the production of race science.”

She explained that disciplines such as psychology had historically been involved in attempts to provide scientific justification for claims about racial differences in intelligence, morality, criminality and other areas.

“Universities were thus complicit in justifying racism,” she said, warning that some contemporary academic traditions continued to rely on racialised assumptions about what constituted normality, objectivity and neutrality.

Kessi acknowledged that important changes had occurred at the University of Cape Town following the Rhodes Must Fall movement and the activism of Black scholars, but maintained that substantial work remained.

“We still have a long way to go given the historical, political, and structural roots of institutional racism in the academy,” she said.

She concluded that meaningful transformation required “multiple interventions at different levels, ideological, structural, bureaucratic, and interpersonal levels.”

Dr Sabelo Mcinziba, an interdisciplinary researcher whose work focuses on power, knowledge, violence, identity and the question of the human, warned against treating the success of exceptional Black scholars as evidence that racial inequality had been overcome.

He argued that the academy had historically celebrated a small number of Black intellectuals while leaving the structures that constrain wider Black participation largely untouched.

“The liberalism of the academy allows for the celebration of Arday’s exceptionalism without needing to do deep structural reflection on the impediments it puts in the way of the very people that Arday is a representational symbol of,” Mcinziba said.

He criticised what he described as the excessive emphasis on “black excellence”, arguing that exceptional achievement could become a mechanism through which institutions avoid confronting structural inequality.

“Black excellence does not force deep structural change,” he said, warning that the celebration of exceptional Black figures could isolate them from other Black scholars and communities.

According to Mcinziba, the deeper problem was institutional gatekeeping that makes it difficult for Black scholars to be regarded simply as ordinary members of the academic community.

“The white world has created conditions for an impossible sight to behold, and that is a normal or ordinary black person,” he quoted Lewis Gordon as saying.

Mcinziba argued that the experience of Jason Arday belonged to a much longer history in which

were admitted into institutions as exceptional figures but remained vulnerable to scrutiny, delegitimation and exclusion.