I’m so angry. We’ve set the conditions once again so that the philosophers, lawyers, art historians, film critics, sociologists, political scientists are more likely to herald from a white, landed gentry. People who read John Locke & sagely nod their heads in agreement.

We’ve spent two decades leveraging diversity, equity, access not because everyone feels better having a token black in their classroom (because they don’t) but because it TRANSFORMS KNOWLEDGE

Students think better when they meet people who are nothing like them. They learn to argue across deep differences without killing each other. Teachers teach better when challenged by students whose already existing knowledge sits at odds with the narrative in the textbook.

Researchers who have experience of homelessness ask different questions about economy, social policy than those living in the inner-city terrace their parents bought for them when they “left home”. The colonised asked different questions from the colonisers.

I’m not saying rich kids don’t have a deserving and valuable place in higher education. I’m saying at $45k for a BA, there more likely to be the only ones able to do one. And their experience of the classroom will be lesser for it. What they learn will be diminished.

Our classrooms are the engine room of institutional knowledge production and if we return to homogoneous classrooms we will end up with a research pipeline that delivers less understanding of the world we live, it’s most urgent problems and how to do better.