Guy Debord's Cat

Once upon a time, Goldsmiths College, a federated institution of the University of London, had a reputation as a radical seat of learning. Sadly, those days are mostly behind the college. In the last fifteen years, possibly longer, the shine has come off as Warden after Warden has implemented unpopular “transformations” that have led to redundancies and the closure of some minority courses. Prof Frances Corner, the most recent Warden of Goldsmiths, who also adopted the title of Vice-Chancellor, left the college a whole academic year before her leaving date. No one seems to know why, although I have a suspicion that it’s related to the college’s very costly independent KC-led antisemitism inquiry, which, according to a Freedom of Information request submitted by Michael Rosen, has cost more than £485,000. More about that later and how I found myself being used as a possible scapegoat by Prof Corner and the senior management team.

Let’s return to Prof Corner. She became Warden of Goldsmiths in 2019, succeeding Prof Patrick Loughrey, who had been in the role since 2010. Corner took charge in August of that year and made herself unpopular within a month of assuming control. From March, there had been a student occupation of the Stuart Hall Building (Oh, the irony!) and Deptford Town Hall, where senior management’s offices are located. The purpose of this occupation was to protest institutional racism and to demand that the college decolonize the curriculum. During this time, I was an associate lecturer working in the Department of Theatre and Performance. One of my students, who was Black and of mixed heritage, complained to me that there were racist lecturers and that he had personally experienced racism. Indeed, one lecturer claimed that the effort to decolonize the curriculum was inherently antisemitic. The occupation ended in July 2019 after senior management, led by Prof Corner, apparently committed themselves to addressing complaints of institutional racism. Their statement read:

Partly in response to the student campaign, Goldsmiths is committing an additional £500,000 over the next year alone to support this work. The College’s management team has published a Statement of commitments made to GARA (PDF) on how the College will accelerate and build on its work in this area, including:

• Developing mandatory training for all student-facing staff on race awareness, to be rolled out during the next academic year;
• Additional staffing to support Dr Nicola Rollock’s work on addressing the degree attainment gap and her wider audit of the experience of BME students and staff;
• A number of new staff roles across areas including student wellbeing and counselling, project support, and chaplaincy services;
• A review of current procedures for tackling racism and other forms of discrimination and harassment, and the operation of our Hate Crime Reporting Centre;
• Discussing further proposals for better representation of BME students at department level, and ensuring such representatives are adequately supported;
• Committing an additional £20k of funding for Black History events and an additional £20k of funding for events organised through the chaplaincy for faith groups;
• Identifying a larger multi-faith prayer space on campus;
• Reinstating two scholarships for residents of Palestine who intend to return to help fellow Palestinians after their studies.

Colleagues and student groups from across Goldsmiths will be engaged with this work, including members of the student protest group Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action (GARA). This group occupied Deptford Town Hall on New Cross Road for four months from mid-March 2019.

This direct action was brought to a close on Friday 26 July 2019 after the College and the campaigners established a mutually-agreed Statement of commitments made to GARA (PDF).

Following the agreement, on 29 July 2019 Acting Warden Professor Elisabeth Hill wrote an open letter to all students and staff emphasising the collective effort required to address the issues raised by the campaigners.

Professor Hill wrote: “While the occupation has been brought to a close, GARA has stated clearly that its campaign will continue and I again stress the need for each and every one of us to reflect on how we can contribute to the collaborative work to tackle racial justice.”

Goldsmiths management also issued the following statement in which it said it was committed to anti-racism training for all staff. The text reads as follows:

• Every level of staff will undergo the training. This training will commence in the academic year 2019/20 going forward as reflective of the initial meeting of the Anti-Racism Training Steering Group
• This training is to be rolled out across future academic years and for incoming staff members
• SMT and the Communications team will be prioritised as early adopters
• There will be discussion about how best to roll out the programme across the College in the way that is most effective and in discussion with the Anti-Racism Training Steering Group
• There will continue to be an additional 2 GARA representatives and 2 representatives from each of the liberation groups (Black, Disabled, LGBT+, Trans, Women) in the Stakeholder Group(s)

And:

Several Senior Management Team members and key Communications team staff attended and completed a two-day, externally-run training course during the 2019/20 academic year.

The College launched two open-tender processes with the aim of appointing an experienced facilitator or team of facilitators with expertise in anti-racism to deliver mandatory anti-racism training to all staff. The anti-racism training working group was unable to identify a suitable supplier from these rounds and the decision was made not to award the contract at this time.  

Training has been delivered to members of Goldsmiths Leadership Group, which comprises of senior academics in leadership positions and senior professional services staff. The training, which was three days of training spread across Spring term 2024, is intended to empower senior colleagues to lead change at the College. 

Further staff training is planned for academic year 2024-25. 

The statement claims that “further staff training is planned for [this academic year]”. Thus far, nothing has happened. I have seen no evidence of anti-racism training at Goldsmiths. A year or so after the GARA inquiry was closed, Goldsmiths art lecturer, Evan Ifekoya, first withdrew his labour from the college and resigned a short time later, citing institutional racism as a causal factor.

In their letter, Ifekoya said that a missive had been circulating among staff that encouraged staff members to voice their support that the university extend fixed-term contracts for employees, as five out of six Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) workers in the art department’s B.A. program are on such contracts. (Goldsmiths has planned not to renew any fixed-term contracts.) According to Ifekoya, “some [colleagues] responded by arguing that all staff matter, as if the mere mention of BAME workers takes attention away from white people.”

It is already well known that in the Higher Education sector, most of the casualized staff on short or fixed term contracts are people from racialized minority groups or women. ArtsNews reported:

Over the past year, Goldsmiths has been the subject of scrutiny in the British media for the way it has dealt with race. Last summer, for 137 days, a group known as the Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action occupied one of the university’s main buildings, alleging that the school had acted against its BAME students and promoted “institutional racism.” Goldsmiths pledged to do more to fight racism among its student body and staff, and several months later, the university released the findings of a survey about the matter.

The report revealed that 26 percent of students surveyed had experienced racism, either from staff members or from their colleagues. Nearly half of all respondents said the school’s curriculum did not privilege the experience of BAME students, and just 5 percent of respondents said they believed the school’s senior management was diverse. (After the report was issued, some students claimed the report was “watered down.”)

While racism continues to thrive at Goldsmiths, antisemitism is being prioritized over other forms of discrimination. This is problematic, not least because it prompts the accusation that Jewish students and staff enjoy special privileges, and that discrimination against other minorities won’t be treated as seriously. This is a dangerous road for Goldsmiths to travel on, but it is also damages the fight against the very antisemitism the college says it wants to address. Furthermore, it harms the fight against racism more generally and will lead to an upsurge in racially-motivated attacks and we’ve seen this already. This is something that neither the CST, CAA nor Gnasher Jew wants to admit. The CAA, especially, isn’t interested in working with anti-racism groups because it seeks to instrumentalize antisemitism in order to shut down criticism of Israel. I will be writing a blog about this in due course.

So, where does this come from? Before I continue, I need to go back in time to 2023.

In May 2023, Goldsmiths, under pressure from the Community Security Trust (CST) and CAA, and probably, Gnasher Jew, launched what it called an ” independent KC-led antisemitism inquiry”. At this point, it’s worth pointing out that the earlier GARA racism inquiry was neither KC-led nor was it particularly independent. The antisemitism inquiry was ostensibly launched after Goldsmiths Student Union president, Sara Bafo, accused David Hirsh, a senior lecturer in sociology, who himself has close ties to the CAA, of being a white supremacist. In 2022, Hirsh had posted a tweet in which he smeared the students’ demand for decolonization of the curriculum. Here’s the tweet:

Hirsh also posted this rather patronizing tweet about Black Lives Matter.

Curiously, he also claims that anti-racism should be intersectional and yet, he and the CAA don’t work with anti-racism groups. Indeed, one wonders why Hirsh, who is an apparent expert in antisemitism and also, it is claimed (largely by CAA and The Jewish Chronicle) racism, would smear efforts to decolonize the curriculum or education more generally, as “antisemitic”. It should not be forgotten that today’s racism has its origins in colonialism and empire, and was supported by a body of pseudoscience that insisted that people of African origin have “lower IQs” and are only suited to manual labour and lives of subservience to the European hegemony. Does he deny that or is there something else behind his words? Well, let’s put it this way: whenever racism against racialized minorities rears its head, Hirsh is nowhere to be seen. One may easily get the impression that Hirsh doesn’t like Black and Brown people and, therefore, sees us as problematic. The only time he mentions Black people is when he can weaponize them to make some point about how awful Black people are for complaining about racism.

Goldsmiths antisemitism inquiry dragged on for two years and in that time, Mohinderpal Sethi, the KC put in charge of the inquiry found a series of examples of antisemitis, but my name did not appear as an example. Sethi also made some good statements in defence of free speech, and attacked the flawed IHRA working definition of antisemitism. In the summer of 2025, the inquiry was wound up and after spending close to half a million pounds, it also concluded that there should be more Kosher options in the college’s food outlets, but there should also be mandatory, but separate, antisemitism training for all staff. Remember, that, for all senior management’s talk about anti-racism training, nothing actually happened. No anti-racism training has taken place, and no organization or group has been approached to run such courses. Yet, rather than include antisemitism as part of anti-racism training, the college has decided to treat antisemitism separately. Why has it done this? Moreover, why weren’t the group of 14 Jewish academics at Goldsmiths not consulted about these plans nor asked to provide statements to the inquiry while it was running?

Here’s a statement that was posted on Michael Rosen’s Substack feed:

Requests by our ad hoc group to meet with Professor Dinham to discuss the shape of the action plan governance structure have been repeatedly rebuffed and we have been told that the plan is ‘owned’ by Goldsmiths Council and therefore not up for debate. Instead, we have been offered informal meetings which we do not consider to be part of any meaningful consultation. Our reluctance to engage in future meetings and workshops is therefore based on what we believe to be fundamental flaws in the action plan and its implementation.

To date, no one has explained why the university is making a special case for antisemitism as a single example of racism. This argument wasn’t made at the time of setting up the Inquiry nor the action plan and now, as the plan moves forwards into ‘conversations’ and enactment, the argument has still not been made. The college has now spent well over £500,000 at a time of severe financial hardship on an inquiry and action plan without a clear and detailed timetable or buy-in from affected staff and students.

We have argued that the College should fold antisemitism into a university-wide programme of anti-racism training but this has been repeatedly rejected. If the argument had been put as to why antisemitism is a special case, then we would at least have something on the table to discuss (and to have a ‘conversation’ about), but there is nothing.

So, the question remains: why do Goldsmiths senior managers insist on treating antisemitism separately to other forms of racism and discrimination? It seems to me that they’ve internalized the hierarchy of racisms and are, at the same time, internalized a racial hierarchy that was first established during the days of empire. It’s also worth noting that the senior management team, while it has one person of South Asian origin in the role of Chief Finance and Infrastructure Officer, is comprised mostly of white people. Andrew Dinham, mentioned in Prof Rosen’s post, is the Executive Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Culture and Belonging. I find these titles somewhat confusing. What culture? What belonging? What is clear to me is that there’s a large body of people at Goldsmiths, staff and students alike, who don’t feel that they belong. I am one of them.

It’s obvious to me that it is the intention of senior management to close down criticism of Israel’s brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank, while, at the same time, privileging antisemitism over other forms of racism. It is also clear that while many of those at the forefront of anti-antisemitism action want antisemitism to be treated as a form of racism, they want it to be treated separately from other forms of racism. Why? Israel is a settler-colonial state and those of us who want to see the curriculum decolonized are seen as a threat to the existence of the Zionist entity. In other words, they know Israel is a settler-colonial state and are fighting hard to present it as otherwise. They delude themselves while lying to us.

I shall now return to Prof Corner, who left Goldsmiths under a cloud. Her dictatorial style combined with her callous treatment of academic staff contributed to her departure. She’s left the college with a massive payout. But the main contributing factor in her demise was the way she spent a large sum of money on an antisemitism inquiry that failed to achieve what management wanted it to achieve. Namely, they wanted to hold their hands up and say to the CAA and CST, “Yes! Goldsmiths is a hotbed of antisemitism! You were right all along!” However, in order to demonstrate that they were seriously committed to rooting out antisemitism, they needed to find an example. They thought that they had one in me.

In late July 2023, the college contacted me with regards to a “very serious matter”. When I asked what that matter was, I was told that I needed to attend a meeting. I replied that I was on my way to the airport and requested that they send me an email. As I approached the airport, the email landed in my inbox, and when I opened it, I was astonished to find that I had been vexatiously accused of “spreading” antisemitism. The charge related to a reply to a tweet that I sent to David Hirsh. Hirsh, for his part, blocked me and then unblocked me to tell me that “[he] should have sued [me]”.

In an earlier reply (below), I was cryptically referring to Hirsh’s fan love for David Baddiel, who, while he was one of the hosts of The Fantasy Football League, blacked up and placed a pineapple on his head to mock footballer, Jason Lee. This is an example of how the knowledge of the Other works with regards to racism. There is some context to this: months earlier, stories appeared in the press about the landlady of the White Hart Inn in Grays who had festooned the building in golliwogs. The press ran with the story and asked the inevitable “Are golliwogs racist?” The answer to that question is “yes, they are”. For those who don’t know, the golliwog has its origins in blackface minstrelsy as this article by Michael Pickering explains.

Threatening people with lawsuits is the act of a bully, but using, or rather, hiding, behind GnasherJew and the CAA to channel a complaint is another level of bullying. Any judge worth their salt would throw out vexatious lawsuits (also known as lawfare). For his part, Hirsh seems to have deleted the brief exchange between us and yet, as you can see, Gnasher Jew hasn’t taken down their actionable tweet and neither has the CAA.

So, what happened to Goldsmiths’ and the CAA’s case against me? After dragging me through an ill-advised eight month disciplinary process, the college decided there was no case to answer. Originally, Prof Corner insisted on chairing the disciplinary hearing. Goldsmiths UCU reminded her that she’d written an inscription to Prof Hirsh’s most recent work and had to recuse herself because of a conflict of interest. It was an embarrassing climbdown. At the disciplinary hearing, I left them with this parting shot: Goldsmiths doesn’t have a social media policy. The chair’s face was a picture, and they didn’t get their scapegoat.

Goldsmiths was later forced to make a public apology to me. As for my role as an associate lecturer in the Theatre and Performing Arts department (now called the School of Music, English and Theatre), I’ve been completely erased as if I never existed. However, I still have a Goldsmiths email account ad Frances Corner is gone. I suppose that’s something to be thankful for.