Slavery Remnants and Dodgy Donors Fuelling Racism at Oxbridge

Race & Society

By Dr Shravan Nosib

“Elite universities are not institutions of merit; they are institutions of legacy, wealth, and race, designed to reproduce the ruling class.”
 — Dr Ibram X. Kendi

Elite universities across the world have never been neutral ground on race. From Harvard and Yale’s well-documented profits from slavery to the Ivy League’s historic quota systems restricting minority admissions, to the persistent underrepresentation of Black faculty at America’s top research institutions, the pattern is global: prestige and exclusion have long travelled together.

The Oriel College statue of Cecil Rhodes—architect of British colonialism in southern Africa—exemplifies financial influence over memory. Stood on the High Street facade for over a century following his bequest, its removal was rejected during the 2016 “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign after donors threatened to withdraw funding. Pic – The Guardian

Britain’s own elite institutions are no exception, and in some respects sit at the very origin of the pattern. Oxford and Cambridge present themselves as timeless seats of learning, insulated by tradition from the grubbier currents of history. However, stripped of the Latin ceremonies and ancient stonework, a harsher picture emerges: for centuries, both universities absorbed wealth extracted from enslaved people directly into their institutional bloodstream, and in the modern era they have shown a strikingly similar willingness to accept money from ethically compromised sources with minimal scrutiny.

This historical entanglement, coupled with the persistence of an opaque donor culture today, forms a continuous institutional pattern that helps explain why both universities still struggle to address racial exclusion convincingly. I do not claim that donations mechanically “cause” racism; rather, that an institutional culture willing to prioritise money over provenance for three centuries is unlikely to have developed the accountability needed to confront racial inequality seriously. The record — including two cases of scholars of colour undone by the institutions that once celebrated them — bears this out.

The Historical Money Trail

The financial relationship between Oxbridge and slavery is well documented, not merely symbolic. Between 1761 and 1776, sons of South Carolinian planter families outnumbered students from every other American colony at Oxford two to one, an imbalance funded entirely by plantation profit. This money crystallised into permanent institutional wealth still in use today: at Cambridge, the McMahon Law Studentships at St. John’s College were endowed directly from money made on West Indian estates, and graduating students customarily left silver gifts — many traceable to slave-trade fortunes — that remain college property today.

The scale was not marginal; several hundred donors across both universities’ histories carried traceable links to slave-trade capital. When the government compensated slaveholders after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, 241 Oxford alumni and 190 Cambridge alumni were among the roughly three thousand people paid for the “loss” of enslaved human beings as property.

Dodgy Donors: The Modern Continuation

This willingness to overlook the origin of donated funds did not end with abolition; it simply changed form. Oxford’s donor-vetting committee was born out of scandal after a journalist posing as a wealthy donor was told a significant financial gift would see his son’s application “looked upon extremely favourably.” It has not stopped the flow of troubling money: Oxford fought in court to keep secret the identity behind a multi-million-pound gift facilitated by a powerful Azerbaijani politician, and accepted over £100 million in anonymous donations between 2017 and 2023 alone.

Most starkly, Oxford and two of its colleges accepted more than £12 million from a trust built on the fortune of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, prompting Black Lives Matter UK to demand the “tainted” money be returned. The through-line from slave money to secret money is structural: prestige is for sale, provenance is optional, and reputational risk is managed rather than treated as a reason to refuse.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College distills this dynamic into a single, undisguised transaction. Rhodes, an architect of British colonial expansion into southern Africa, left Oriel money in his will, and his statue has stood on the college’s High Street facade for over a century. In 2016, after the first wave of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign, Oriel’s governing body decided against removal once donors reportedly threatened to withdraw funding.

In 2020, amid global Black Lives Matter protests, the same governing body voted to remove the statue and launched an independent commission, which itself recommended removal. In 2021, Oriel reversed course again, citing “regulatory and financial challenges,” and the statue remains in place today. This telling sequence — capitulate to donor pressure in 2016, promise removal in 2020, retreat under cost pressure in 2021 — is a perfect example of my article’s central claim: when moral judgment and financial self-interest collide at Oxbridge, financial self-interest repeatedly wins.

Mechanisms of Institutional Racism

The link between historic money and present exclusion becomes clearer once the underlying mechanisms are named. In academia, researchers describe “cultural taxation”: the unpaid extra burden placed on Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) academics to sit on diversity committees, mentor minority students, and act as informal departmental “experts” on race — labour rarely asked of white colleagues or rewarded at promotion. I fulfill exactly this role at the University of Saskatchewan, and I am all too familiar with this strategy.

Another mechanism reframes ordinary assertiveness as “personality conflict”; behaviour interpreted as rigorous in a white colleague is often perceived as difficult or non-collegial in a BIPOC peer, producing what researchers term “racial battle fatigue” — the cumulative toll of navigating that double standard. Asymmetric investigation and escalation of allegations against BIPOC scholars completes this triad. Jason Arday’s case is stark evidence: a plagiarism claim his own former university had already investigated and dismissed years earlier was resurrected into a campaign his employer did little to contain.

Two Scholars, One Pattern

This pattern has a human cost, and it repeats across generations. In 1935, the 24-year-old Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar presented his theory on massive stars collapsing into black holes to the Royal Astronomical Society. His mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, publicly dismissed his work as “stellar buffoonery,” and his theory was disavowed with the support of Bohr, Dirac, and Pauli — even though they agreed with it privately. Humiliated, Chandrasekhar left Cambridge for Chicago in 1937, and it took nearly 40 years for the observational discovery of black holes before he won the 1983 Nobel Prize. Race, he later pointed out, shaped how easily the British scientific establishment sided against a young Indian student in favour of an revered figure.

Cambridge produced a devastating echo of the Chandrasekhar episode nearly a century later. In 2023, Jason Arday became the university’s youngest-ever Black professor. Within three years, he faced severe public and professional pressure as critics scrutinized his biography and doctoral thesis. His family stated he was “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”

Simon Baron-Cohen, a colleague, noted Arday believed he was witnessing “a racist playbook to discredit Black academics.” While inquiries continue to clarify responsibilities, it is difficult to separate this sequence from the core argument: an institution that spent centuries applying minimal scrutiny to the money it accepts applied a very different, corrosive scrutiny to one of the few Black academics to reach its senior ranks — scrutiny that, by his family’s account, he did not survive. To make matters worse, the university recently appointed a controversial figure in the same division to defend its commitment to diversity.

Connecting Money to Racial Exclusion

The link between donor culture and racial exclusion is institutional, not mechanical. A university that treats the provenance of funds as secondary to its reputation and size has correspondingly under-invested in the self-scrutiny anti-racist reform demands. Indeed, MP David Lammy accused Oxbridge of “social apartheid” in a review of Black student admissions across their colleges over a multi-year period. I am personally aware of two outstanding Mauritian candidates who were refused admission to Oxford for unspecified reasons; one achieved four straight A*s in her A-Levels, while the other was her school’s valedictorian.

Conclusion

Oxford and Cambridge were partially built and endowed by slavery’s profits, and that willingness to accept ethically compromised wealth without serious scrutiny persists today in anonymous donations, donor-secrecy court battles, and money tied to fascism. Neither university has shown the institutional self-scrutiny anti-racist reform demands, nor do the costs fall on scholars like Chandrasekhar and Arday — met with a level of hostility the institutions never applied to their own benefactors. Institutions with such financial histories carry a heavy burden of proof. Having shown for three centuries that money can outweigh moral scrutiny, Oxford and Cambridge owe transparency, not reassurance. Until that changes, old patterns persisting in new forms will remain impossible to ignore.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 18 September 2026