Universities have failed Black Students For Too long

July 2, 2020 9:20 AM

The Free Black University is a hub for radical and transformative knowledge production. "The Free Black University exists to re-distribute knowledge and act as a space of incubation for the creation of transformative knowledge in the Black community. We firmly believe education should centre Black people healing and it should be free, anti-colonial, and accessible to all – so we will provide it."

Melz Owusu has crowdfunded £60,000 to start a decolonised institution. Will existing universities agree to help fund it? [The Guardian]

The Free Black University was founded after years of campaigning for Black rights by Melz Owusu, who will soon be a PhD researcher at The University of Cambridge.

“We realised that our current institutions do not have the full capacity, or imagination, to be able to serve our community in our wholeness. We started The Free Black University to do just that,”. [Gay Times]

The Free Black University has more information on its official Twitter.

Fundraising for the Free Black University is currently at £80,000 of a goal of £250,000. A key aim of the fundraiser is for existing universities to redistribute money to the initiative by making an annual donation. "Owusu sees this as a way not only for institutions to fulfil their promises to current black students, but as payback for the role they have played in the progress of racism, from benefiting from donations by slave owners to developing the study of eugenics." [The Guardian]

Owusu's campaign comes at a time when only a fifth of UK universities have committed to decolonising the curriculum.

posted by Balthamos (6 comments total)

I am an American, so forgive me, but: what parallels and differences are there with this idea and with the Open University?

I have always admired the notion that anyone could attend O.U.; is this effort intended to pursue a similar end, but focused more on Black students?
posted by wenestvedt at 12:40 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

The motives behind The Free Black University are more radical than the OU. They include open access lectures and output like podcasts, and of course will be free. I think the aim is for it to eventually gain degree-granting status but initially you wouldn’t get a degree. I see it more as a model for a new kind of community-centered education that is deliberately divergent and decolonised from the UK university system as it currently stands. It’s not trying to just be an open access university like the OU.
posted by Balthamos at 1:53 PM on July 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is neat. As a cynical person, I'm not entirely sure how you build a university with academic faculty for £250k except to hire a professional fundraiser for two years or rely entirely on volunteer labor. (The later of which is a good thing in general. But, also, Black academics are asked to do too much of that already during their day jobs.) Presumably they've thought a lot more about it than me and have a plan that makes sense. Thanks for the post.

(I know there's a general metafilter policy against posting active fundraisers. Personally, I'd much prefer to see this one stay up. But, I won't be angry if the mods disagree.)
posted by eotvos at 2:04 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think it's an interesting post about a different kind of university fundraising model--recognizing that there are simply limits to the old crusty institutions that should be broken somehow.

It reminds one of the Mechanics and Nurses schools that sprung up in the US to meet the needs of working people post reconstruction. Of course, those were subject to violence by white supremacists at the time. One hopes we could do better in 2020.

I don't know the aims of the Free Black University, but I can see an overwhelming need to distinguish a whole institution dedicated to culturally appropriate education. I used to teach 4th and 6th and 12th grade environmental studies in Louisiana to public schools that were 98% Black students. Part of the approved lesson plan was to blather on about Bienville, and how his use and knowledge of the coastal waters was instrumental to fool the British and found New Orleans. You can imagine that most of the students would look at the ceiling when being lectured about the supposed importance of a dude who wrote the Code Noir. I stopped teaching the lesson, there wasn't a point, there was no retention.

The point of teaching the lesson was that learning your local waters and tides, sciencewise, can be exciting and useful, and enables you to shape history. That is not what Black students got from the Bienville lesson at all. But any effort on my part to change the lesson--to, say, be about Black mariners who ferried people to freedom, or steamboat captains who struggled with Louisiana laws against Black sailors, or, who, like Robert Smalls, used environmental cues to seize a Confederate Ship (and himself) and flee to the Union line, and later to fight for the Union--well, that was just "stirring up trouble." It was Bienville or nothing, and I chose nothing rather than have a whole semester of environmental education be tainted with that first day.

Although those stories are the culturally appropriate lesson that would accomplish the goal of students learning some environmental history relevant to their lives. It would have simply been the effective lesson, It was not part of some agenda. If you want kids to get excited about tides, and about seamanship, I mean, what is more exciting that someone enslaved freeing themselves? But, having dealt with curriculum requirements, I understand why you would need to create a whole new program in order for that history lesson to be found 'legitimate.'
posted by eustatic at 6:14 PM on July 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

There's also a lot to be said about classes where Black people can 'caucus.' When I was a TA in university, there 1) were very few Black students 2) were often the questions of White students who would just...impose themselves and their baggage on the lesson. It was tiring to me, the white instructor. But in that case, as an instructor, it was my job to deal with the white person's baggage and ignorance, especially since that ignorance probably reflected a good number of the students.

I can see the effectiveness in getting rid of those impediments to education for the other students.
posted by eustatic at 6:37 PM on July 2, 2020

Another important element is seeking redress and compensation/reparations in the form of donations from universities. They are suggesting £50k per institution which is based on the cost of 2 students on a 3 year full time course. So as well as formulating a model of education which centres black students, there’s also this element of acknowledgement and redress that conventional universities have done them harm.
posted by Balthamos at 1:00 AM on July 3, 2020 [1 favorite]