First published on Fri 12 Mar 2021 08.09 EST
Students at Soas University of London have called for its director to resign after a meeting where he used the N-word in response to a question about lecturers using the term in class.
In a meeting on Thursday afternoon between students and Adam Habib – a recording of which has been seen by the Guardian – a student asked: “How can Soas issue statements about Black Lives Matter while … allowing lecturers to say the N-word in class?”
Habib, saying the word aloud in a fragmented response, said: “The issue around that is, I personally on the [N-word], somebody making that allegation, then just bring it to me, I don’t know the case.”
EZB-Regelwerk für Kreditsicherheiten bevorzugt Klimasünder
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Dos activistas de Greenpeace aterrizan en parapente en la azotea del BCE
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Ziauddin Shakeb loved classical Indian poetry and the Urdu language, contributing to BBC Urdu for many years
Ziauddin Shakeb loved classical Indian poetry and the Urdu language, contributing to BBC Urdu for many years
MahamidAhmed
Sun 7 Mar 2021 12.48 EST
Last modified on Sun 7 Mar 2021 12.51 EST
My grandfather Ziauddin Shakeb, who has died aged 87 of pulmonary oedema, was a historian of Indo-Persian relations and a world-renowned expert on Persian and Arabic manuscripts, working as a consultant at Christie’s auction house in London for 30 years. He was born in India and moved to the UK in 1980 to take up a post at Soas University of London.
Beyond that, though, there’s reason to believe that these proposals are more about appealing to voters and capitalising on the moral panic about universities than actually helping them to protect free speech. The government doesn’t seem to trust anyone on campus, staff or student; they want to be in charge of what good speech is and what bad speech is, and they also want us to believe that by policing and enforcing free speech (the good free speech that
they will define) they can resolve this problem.
At this point I think we need to ask two questions: first, do they really want to solve the problem? And, second, is the problem what they say it is?