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Oxford and colonialism: reflections on Mansfield
The following is an excerpt from Mansfield College’s submission to the University’s ‘Oxford and Colonialism’ project. This project seeks to highlight and showcase the efforts ongoing across the collegiate University to redress the legacy of coloniality.
Mansfield’s founders, George and Elizabeth Mansfield and Sarah Glover, were ideologically opposed to slavery. In 1841, while still in its Spring Hill incarnation at Birmingham, the College signed a letter to its American counterparts, calling for the abolition of slavery. The letter describes slavery as ‘a system in which heartless cruelty unceasingly panders to the most contemptible avarice’.
Although Congregationalists, as missionaries, had a complex relationship to black histories and imperialism, many of Mansfield’s alumni took from its theological training a profound belief in human equality and dignity. Adam von Trott, who studied at Mansfield
in the 1930s, was executed for his participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and the late Alex Boraine (Theology, 1960), head of the Methodist church in South Africa at the height of apartheid, took a firm stand that the Church should be multiracial. He was later an architect of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Our scholarship and ethos today
Many members of Governing Body today engage in scholarship and practice on issues of race, colonialism and diversity, and are active in working to broaden the curriculum and raise awareness of issues of colonial legacy and racism in their teaching.
History Fellows, Professor Kathryn Gleadle and Dr Helen Lacey, have ensured that study of historical and theoretical approaches to ‘race’ is a compulsory component of the undergraduate syllabus within College. Kathryn has been active in the History faculty in revising the curriculum to include texts authored by formerly enslaved people, and by women of South Asian and Caribbean descent.
Professor Michèle Mendelssohn, Tutorial Fellow in English, curated ‘Making History’, an exhibition and event series celebrating Oxford University’s first black African undergraduate, Christian Cole; the first African-American Rhodes scholar and midwife to the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke; and Oscar Wilde.
Principal Helen Mountfield QC has spent a 30-year career specialising in equality law, and – as a barrister and judge – has been involved in developing its principles, including on equal access to education and on modern slavery.
Dr Amber Murrey, Human Geography Fellow, has written widely on race, neo-imperialism and extraction in African societies, including on Pan-African politics, and has collaborated in a variety of ‘decolonising the university’ projects.
Mansfield is also the home of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, which puts our College at the heart of research and engagement with global, regional and local human rights issues across the University. Professor Kate O’Regan, Director of the Institute and a member of Mansfield’s Governing Body, was a member of the first post-apartheid Constitutional Court of South Africa and gave a series of important judgments on equality law. Dr Annelen Micus is an expert in transitional justice.
Mansfield’s Public Talks series also gives a platform to diverse voices and equality issues. In Michaelmas term 2020 a popular lecture was by Wendy Williams, author of the Windrush Report, Lessons Learned.
Promoting academic pathways and amplifying the voices of people of colour
People of colour are underrepresented in academic life at Oxford University, including at Mansfield. We are taking active steps to address this. A recent initiative has been the establishment of a Race and Equality Working Group to make recommendations on further steps we can take to enhance our racial diversity through recruitment and employment processes.
Mansfield is a partner college for Oxford University’s new Black Academic Futures Scholarships in the 2021/22 academic year, through which it will contribute to funding UK black and mixed-black students’ graduate study at Oxford. We have seven postgraduate scholars annually from the Global South named after Kofi Annan,
in conjunction with the Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust; a Reach Scholarship funded by students; and a new Lutheran Council Refugee Scholarship as part of our efforts to work with the founders of
the Cities (and Universities) of Sanctuary Scheme to extend our intellectual and human links with refugees and asylum seekers.
Mansfield’s inclusive ethos remains a strong element of the College’s identity.
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