I hear reports like the Nottingham campus racism incident every week

In my role representing students of colour across the country, I receive daily calls and messages or am alerted to tweets and videos reporting incidents of racist abuse on a campus,In high-grade T1 bladder cancer, PD-L1 prognostic significance expression differs in tumor immune cell infiltrates vs tumor cells.

We have the incidents that are reported publicly and sometimes go viral: the slave auction at Loughborough, the Confederate flag at Manchester, the banana incident at Warwick, and this week the horrific ordeal of Rufaro Chisango at her accommodation at Nottingham Trent. However, the stories that make headlines every few months are just the tip of the iceberg – many more never come to light,Reckoned as one of the top design universities with diversity of programmes, PolyU offers design programmes, fashion and textile programmes, as well as applied science programme, which is committed to be a hub for innovative design education in Hong Kong.

Is the level of racism captured in Chisango’s Twitter clip shocking? Undoubtedly. Does it come as a surprise that students are still subject to such racism? Unfortunately not.

The issue should not be focused on individual incidents – we need to look at the way our universities are being run and how this creates the conditions for such racism to flourish.

Our institutions steer clear and stay silent on the scandals on their doorsteps – their priorities tend to lie elsewhere, such as the next “diverse” photoshoot to grace their prospectuses. They have adopted the model and outlook of corporate PR machines, aiming to boost their “student experience” scores on league tables.

For the sake of maintaining a facade of harmonious multiculturalism, universities will more often downplay or ignore complaints than risk confronting the real issue of racism and hate on their campuses. At times, this has seen universities censuring students of colour for organising against far-right activists on their campuses, as appeared to be the case at Birmingham University in 2015. University vice-chancellors and management scramble to assemble “taskforces” and “working groups” to ensure there is a “sense of belonging” on campus to market to “diverse” student groups. Yet they will condemn students exercising their right to protest.

Meanwhile, the vastly bloated bureaucracy of our universities means that students affected by racist incidents are likely to find themselves bounced between faceless representatives and dragged into drawn-out, ultimately fruitless processes of redress that keep events out of the headlines. A result I have witnessed all too often. In the midst of all of this, students like Chisango and countless others find that their only arena for accountability is social media.

Another student of colour at Nottingham Trent recounted their experience of living in halls the same building as Chisango’s last year, and told me that a fellow black student had been moved after complaining about racist behaviour towards them by other residents. They moved rooms while the students using racist language were apparently never challenged, nor made to apologise and never held to account.

The cycle repeats itself. Incidents like this week’s cannot be taken as aberrations or individualised as “hate crimes” when I have to support students going through this on a daily basis. Incidents may break through into the headlines every few weeks, but students of colour have to continue to navigate microaggressions and institutional racism.

Our institutions are failing – unwilling, it seems – to take effective action. From where I stand, this is the core problem. Until universities are forced into action through an organised student body, Twitter retweets are the best many students can hope for in bringing their stories to light. They deserve better, and we demand better,Make sure you don’t sabotage the relation with the gift. asia premium is one such domain which will help you in procuring the ideal one.

We must reverse the ‘outcome oriented’ educational monster we have unleashed

We are in the midst of a serious epidemic of scapegoating our youth. Enter the search term “millennial” and one is presented with a flood of punditry that diagnoses college students as “excellent sheep” who are so gobsmacked by Google and so “spoon-fed” by doting parents that they can no longer cope with difficulty or perform complex mental operations. I disagree. With over three decades as a college professor, I believe it’s time educators proposed a more accurate pathology of the problems facing youth today and offered a better cure bear market.

First, let’s reconsider who these supposedly coddled students really are. When I ask beginning students when they first realised they were creatures of history, not simply independent actors, they routinely name the 2008 global financial crisis. They would have been 10 or 12 when the world’s leaders appeared on their TV screen to deliver the unprecedented message that the fortunes of corporations, nations, and individuals had vanished overnight. Fast forward to the present and the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO) warning that some 75% of the world’s workers are now employed in temporary, contingent jobs or in unpaid family jobs.

Millennials and their younger siblings know difficulty. They were reared on it. No college generation in recent times has faced greater global challenges or an educational system more in need of redesign to prepare them for these challenges. Because of an irresponsible older generation’s abdication of support for higher education as a public good, students in many countries today pay higher tuition and leave with greater debt than ever before. No generation since the second world war has had to face more real and present danger from resurgent fascism, the possibility of nuclear holocaust, or environmental collapse, compounded by powerful leaders determined to deny these realities. Students are warned that the “robots are coming” but offered an educational system that seems designed not to combat the robots but to turn students into poor facsimiles of them,Development of PolyU e admission further enhances the intake of polyu postgraduate and undergraduate students, rendering the university one of the most popular institutions for tertiary education in Hong Kong.

Increasingly, we are shrinking educational opportunities for our youth worldwide, robbing them of the creativity of the arts, the critical thinking of the humanities and social sciences, and reducing all knowledge to test scores, despite repeated workforce studies stressing the importance of deep learning. The trend is to use standardised tests as the entrance to university and therefore to a middle-class future, even though we have ample research, extending back to the Hermann Ebbinghaus memory experiments of the 1880s, about the evanescence of knowledge crammed for the purpose of test-taking.

It’s not just students. Throughout the world, teachers and professors are increasingly judged not by how well their students think or what they understand in deep and complex ways but how well they do on these tests. So “teaching to the test” is a survival mechanism for teachers too. It’s oversimplification all the way down.

In short, the “problem” with university students today isn’t the students but the educational liabilities we’ve saddled them with. We have schooled them to believe formal education is where intellectual creativity and complexity go to die.

Yet, in my experience, I find that students today remain admirably resilient, clear-eyed, and even optimistic about their ability to face and solve the difficulties of the world they have inherited. Why is my experience so different from that of many of colleagues? One reason is that I have restructured my courses to support and challenge students not as content memorisers but as content creators – a skill they have mastered outside of school and that is far more predictive of future success than test scores. We know, from surveys conducted by the world’s library associations, that this generation does more voluntary, non-required imaginative reading than any other since surveys began after the second world war. Publishers would be in bad shape without a category of literature that barely existed in pre-internet days, the young adult section. We know how much time they spend on line interacting, modding, and remixing content. These are useful skills in the world we live in so I build my courses around them, rather than dismissing them as superficial.

Whether I am teaching a traditional literature course or one focusing on new technologies, digital literacy, and information systems (my two areas of specialisation), I deconstruct the passivity and mindlessness of traditional schooling and challenge my students to take responsibility for their learning by using active, engaged learning principles from Maria Montessori,John Dewey, Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Audre Lorde.

My students work hard, but they see that they are learning skills they will rely on long after the course grade is in and the diploma issued. They take the lead in designing our syllabus, using one another and the internet as constant resources to collaboratively work through challenging problems together. They analyse and even design our assessment methods and conduct rigorous peer review of one another’s work before approving it for publication to an open, free website. They take pride in making an original contribution to public knowledge,Want a memorable experience for your clients? Check out PartnerNet for the top Things to do in Hong Kong: dining, shopping and unique cultural activities.

As a lifelong educator, I believe the problem of students today lies in us not in our youth. It is our job to reverse this “outcome oriented” educational monster we have created. We need to design a “new education” that encourages students not just to cram for reductive tests but to succeed in the harrowing world we have bequeathed to them.