Is Uni Racist? review: despite the provocative title, this documentary was well intentioned – and shocking

Is Uni Racist? had such a bad title that it revived memories of the old BBC Three era, when executives punted out shows such as Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum and F--- Off, I’m Fat. Serious subjects packaged for maximum provocation, and, in this one, adding a little bit of fuel to the culture wars.

Is uni racist? The documentary didn’t answer the question, because it was well-intentioned but journalistically lacking. It established that racist people are racist at university, and the universities mentioned here were terrible at handling it. But was racism at the root of that response? And can all universities be swept up by the title when the programme featured only a handful?

That’s not to minimise the awfulness of some of the stories here. The most shocking case, widely reported at the time, involved a group of students chanting “we hate black people” outside the room of a terrified black student in a Nottingham Trent hall of residence.

Other cases were less nakedly aggressive but no less gobsmacking. At Cardiff University, students put on a “comic” play in which a white student blacked up to play a black lecturer, likening the member of staff to a “dark chocolate slab” and joking that he had been rescued from the “barbaric Hunger Games in South Africa”.

There were other incidents, ranging from “micro-aggressions” to a black student being pinned against a wall by security staff at his hall of residence because they suspected him of being a visiting drug dealer (he had to produce his ID card to prove that he lived there).

Presenter Linda Adey spoke to a representative of Universities UK, who said that universities were institutionally racist. She looked stunned, and asked him twice to repeat it. But it should not have come as a shock, because that conclusion was published in a report in November.

It was instructive, though, to see just how poorly universities responded to reports of racism – although I’ll bet their prospectuses pay lip service to “diversity”. They were slow to act, did little or nothing to support the victims of harassment, and in some cases kept the details of disciplinary hearings secret due to absurd reasoning about “data protection”. In the end, it wasn't clear if this was racism or ineptitude, but black or Asian teenagers contemplating a university education would be forgiven for taking one look at this and deciding it’s not for them.

Is Uni Racist? is available now on BBC Three and airs on BBC One at 10.45pm tonight