Cambridge and Starkey race row

Well, I do feel that I carry the responsibility of representing my country wherever I am, and this responsibility came with the success that I had in last couple of years, not just myself but the whole group of tennis players that comes from Serbia. And athletes in general are, in this moment, the biggest ambassadors that our country has.

- Novak Djokovic

In a press conference, Serbian Tennis superstar Novak Djokovic identifies a key point of success and the weight that comes with it. With success comes the power of representing the majority, in his case his country and all those included within the nation.

The idea of representation and its weight is a lesson that the well-established and prestigious institution of the University of Cambridge has recently learned the hard way. Cambridge newly released a campaign called Dear World, with the goal of raising £2billion for building updates, staff increase and graduate student body expansion. To launch the campaign, they released a video featuring alumnus throughout the years.

Here is where controversy quickly exploded. The video opened with alumni member and historian David Starkey strolling calmly across a classroom, switching on a lighted chalkboard, turning and saying, as he writes the same, ‘Dear world, how do you measure the impact of a university?’ Staff, students and community members quickly responded to the video in shock, saying that David Starkey in no way should be representing the prestigious institution on a global stage, or any stage at all. This is the same David Starkey who just four years earlier on BBC Newsnight made the statement that:

A substantial amount of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.”

He also later made the claim that when listening to the voice of David Lammy, the black Labour MP for Tottenham:

you would think he was white.”

In response to the University’s egregious oversight in choosing Starkey for the video, community members have formed a petition calling for the removal of the video and an apology from Cambridge. Since the formation of the video, the petition has succeeded in getting almost 1,000 signatures and has resulted in the removal of the video. Neither Cambridge, nor Starkey has yet to apologize. Professor Malachi McIntosh, who has spearheaded the petition, has since released a statement pushing for an apology by saying:

Everyone is rightly excited by the fact the video is gone -- as I am -- but simply blotting out history is, I think, and I hope you do too, not enough.”

McIntosh is right to call for an apology. To simply remove the video is not sufficient. Cambridge needs to recognize that by including Starkey in the video they were using a racist and sexist bigot for a poster boy, one who is despised by many. This is a fact that the university either didn't know about or, as is more likely, didn't care to consider. His inclusion and the uni's action during this controversy provokes a message that ‘Starkey is one of us, and we’re proud of that’ to an already elitist university.

We at OBV, stand with those University of Cambridge staff and student bodies who call upon the University leaders , and its development offices, to do what is clearly right and apologise, but even more than that, we would welcome a broader conversation about how such a global prestigious university can effectively reach out to a genuine diverse audience both nationally and globally in a respectful manner.

Cassie Rodgers