At a recent NUS training event held at York University, Craig Cox, the newly elected education officer at the University of Nottingham, claims his sign reading "Bring back slavery" was simply a wind up.
Cox, a Conservative Party activist, was responding to remarks made by a fellow Tory, who suggested that African-Caribbean students might increase knife and gun crime on campus. Cox was presumably suggesting the re-introduction of the enslavement of black people as a solution to this.
The Nottingham University Black and Minority Ethnic Students (BME) Committee is determined to campaign for Cox’s removal as Education Officer. Bayo Randle, President of the BME Committee, commented: ‘’It is difficult to think of any excuse for such behaviour. I feel uneasy about the prospect of working with Mr Cox — a man who clearly shows both a level of ignorance and a lack of respect not befitting somebody who is representing any establishment, let alone one as culturally diverse as University of Nottingham’’.
There is already a climate of unrest at the University of Nottingham, after the University wrongly accused a Muslim student and staff member of viewing illegal terrorist material. These accusations led to arrests and the incarceration of two innocent people.
But the university had no issue with right-wing students inviting a BNP member to write for a student paper and a holocaust denier to speak at an SU event.
Cox describes the allegations against him as a ‘’witch-hunt’’. He is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying that “it's about time the NUS started representing ordinary students again and stopped acting as a front for left-wing zealots”. He describes those who find jokes about the slavery of Africans distasteful and racist as ‘’zealots’’, and anyone who doesn’t as an ‘’ordinary student’’. If academic freedom is curbed under suspicions of terror but freedom of speech is used to defend public bigotry, then serious questions need to be asked.
