Hello and welcome to the media film podcast series, and today we're excited and really glad to have Andy Marsh here with us.
Hi. Hello. And let's just give a bit of a bio about Andy.
So Andy is a fourth year classics undergraduate at Oxford right now and has done an incredible amount of work and her time.
Therefore, the university she is the founder of the Christian Cole Society consists of colour,
which is a really integral group in Oxford and has also generally worked in access and outreach across the university,
both in the classes faculty and Balliol College, and specifically to do with Balliol College.
Last year she wrote Race and Discrimination Report,
compiling the experiences of students of colour at Baylor College and accompanying that with a list of recommended
changes to the college to be sort of immediately implemented to create less of a hostile environment at the college.
And all of these were agreed on by the college. Incredible work there.
And and they're being implemented sort of as we speak now. And she's very soon to just be completing her examinations.
And then from September, she's going to be the deputy director of university access at Brumpton Mama Academy,
starting sort of her her future of working and access.
And thank you so much for joining us today, Andy. Thank you for having me.
Let's just go back. I mean, I don't think there's any need to to to to say anything.
But, you know, what is the problem with classics in race? Well, this is a very big question.
And part of the reason it's such a big question is because this is a long term,
long ingrained problem that I won't say begins, but has a lot of a lot of its origins.
In the 19th century, where Classics has its big revival, its people start to emulate the classics, they start to bring classics back.
And often it's being used as a way to perpetuate empire.
It's being used as a way to justify the atrocities that were done towards people in India,
to justify the atrocities of slavery by using classical texts, classical art.
And, you know, from that point, from that jump, then has these really intrinsic links with colonialism and imperialism that don't go on have not gone.
Having that foundation for any subject is already going to be tough. We then have years and years of classics as sort of the privilege of the elite.
It gets used as a subject that, you know,
your posh white boys are studying in their schools and nobody else is becomes a gatekeeper to be able to pass specific exams to get into Cambridge.
You have to be able to speak Latin. It's not actually that long ago, not that long ago.
It's really not long ago.
And the seventies, I think, is when they got rid of that, um, you know, Indian civil service had loads of questions about classics.
You're fun. You're funnelled in from directly actually from Balliol College because of a man called Benjamin Jowett.
He you know, that's why Balya was known as the Beeliar Raj.
You have got all of this stuff that's like building this really, really big link between classics and colonialism.
There were loads of books on this as well. This is like a very, very well researched thing that people do still debates, whether it's real or not.
There is a lot of research on this that already is going to create this hostile environment that makes it very,
very difficult for people to break into if you exist outside of the sort of typical classicist that you would expect, i.e. posh white boys.
And then recently the diversity with posh white women, which is sort of as far as plastic's has been able to go so far.
A lot of that problem is also because of the stuff that you study within the subject is very, very well.
Some of this is, of course, to do with what you want to survive.
Then we have to think about why those texts survive, why those things are the things that have come back through to us.
But it is a lot of time studying old white men through the lens of old white men.
And that's not going to appeal to you know, I'm a young black woman.
What can I learn from that? What can I get out of that? You know, I'm an anomaly in this subject.
So cassocks has lots and lots of these layers of race problems all the way from how many of
us do the subject through to what we're actually studying through to the discipline itself,
being like actively engaged in really racist colonial imperialist acts across the world.
So there's a there's a lot here to unpack.
And a major problem of this is that a lot of that is just not accepted or it's ignored or people love to have the blinkers or just
think of classics as just the study of the ancient world in this bubble without thinking about the fact that history exists.
I don't know how. Tell your question. There's a lot. There's a lot there about what is wrong.
I think you've well pointed out a lot of the issues in it and a much more concise way.
And then many of the people I've spoken to have been able to.
But I think what you point out, which is which is I think probably the most important in effecting change, is that people do have the blinkers on.
And what do you think the sort of the current state is for people accepting, at least in your experience,
having done so much work in the UK, obviously between Oxbridge and particular about about sex and race,
you know, where is the positioning, do you think,
of people and important people in faculties or in in the people sort of deciding what the discipline is?
Is there a movement of accepting this issue or are we still stuck?
I hate to say it. We're still stuck. I mean, I have been working so calls society.
I started in my third year. I'm now halfway through my fourth year.
We're still having the same conversations. We're still having the same arguments over, you know, we get a textbook on a reading list from a pro.
I'd like a documented pro labour with some really grim views or some really grim descriptions
that are in that you'll be reading a commentary and then suddenly it will be like, oh, yes, this dusky Negress.
I didn't need to read that. And, you know, you raise any of these issues,
you raised concerns about like what you're studying or being told that there is no Eastern stereotype in the Herodotus you're reading and you're like,
I can see the stereotype right there. And you raise these issues and you get Goslee out of the faculty.
I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous. I'm exhausted, frankly,
trying to like we're still stuck in that stage of having to debate whether there is
racism in the subjects when that work has been done like that research has been done.
Go read a book and then let's talk about how we can make the situation better,
that I'm still having to sit there through faculty meetings, through things and say the things that you're saying,
the books that you are recommending, the things that the ideas about the ancient world and about classical civilisation and Western civilisation.
Is this like natural inheritor? All of these things are really, really problematic that they just refuse to listen to.
And I've been portrayed and as I've been said in emails,
is like one undergrad has complained about this thing or a small minority of students have complained and we're all there.
There's a reason we're a small minority. There's not that many of us who are here. And you've just exposed yourselves there.
But also. But that doesn't mean that we should we shouldn't be listened to.
We get written over told. But you must engage in the discourse.
You must listen to everybody's points of view. You can't just not listen.
And we're saying but we have been listening. We have been being forced to listen to this stuff and to read this stuff.
And we're telling you we disagree. And here are some other things that you should maybe consider.
And we're being told that that's. No, no, no. You're not engaging. No, we we're not engaging in the way you want us to engage.
And you have a problem with that. So, yeah, at the moment I've I've gone I don't want anything to do with classics.
I don't want to stay on in the classics. Well, because it just refuses to change or accept that it might have done something wrong.
And how do you respond? I don't know.
Something I constantly had been doing doing work on sort of decolonising English curriculum is, you know, well, it's English.
It's about studying English. You know, these things aren't necessarily therefor going to be white.
It's not relevant today. How much do you want us to you know, the common argument of.
Yeah, but this is and I'm sure you get the same thing. This is the world. This is Greece and Rome.
Rome was fine. You know, these kind of questions. How do you respond to people are a bit like we're trying to you know,
people will go as far as to say we're trying to sort of force our narratives on on a subject which necessarily doesn't accommodate them.
I heard that all the time. Yes. Sorry.
Just to make another point, that ignoring the fact that England colonised a lot of the world and therefore a lot of the world is English speaking now.
So that was one of them is an interesting and interesting.
That was exactly what I was going to say, that firstly, just on this English thing,
you forced us to speak English, that we shouldn't be speaking English right now.
That makes absolutely no sense. The only reason I speak English is because my ancestors were taken from Africa to be your slaves.
So I think we do have a stake in English speaking text.
We absolutely do. The next thing is what is classics?
We have to now think about what we're saying classics is.
And there's some really interesting things about like what the term itself means actually comes from words, meaning things like the best.
And what are we talking about here? A lot of people will tell you the classics is the study of the ancient world.
Well, then if it is decided, well, then surely it should be.
All of the world's not just two countries in the ancient world, we should be thinking about northern Africa,
which we should be thinking about Asia, we should be thinking about ancient China, which we think about all of these different people.
But we're not we're only focussing on Greece and Rome.
And even if you say Catholics should just be Greece and Rome,
you can't forget that all of these areas in the Mediterranean are interacting with each other.
They spent, you know, and from interacting, we mean from violence, colonisation all the way through to trade negotiation.
There is a whole load of stuff happening here. We see influence going both ways.
We see lots of things where you have like portrayals in Egypt of Greek gods,
but with like Ram's horns so that you've got these this miscegenation of cultures that's happening.
You cannot study the ancient world and study only Greece and Rome without studying the
people of colour who they also are seeing around them who are also engaging with.
And we have this huge problem, of course, with Egypt,
which comes up all the time because Egypt inherently goes against the arguments that groups of colour,
cultures of colour can't be advanced if we want to use that term because it was.
And so what we find instead is people trying to associate it with whiteness, trying to say that all the Egyptians were Greek,
trying to say that because it was colonised by Greece in whatever whatever year,
that the importance there is is, is that rather than thinking about the fact that, no,
these are still people of colour, even if there's lots of Greeks going over there, that mixed race, then.
And I just think that, you know, whatever barriers we want to put on classics,
we should think about those geographical barriers and those time barriers that we are putting on classics and why we might be putting those there,
because a lot of the time they are there to sort of uphold this view of white supremacy.
To be honest with you, when we put those in, even those are false.
Even those are false. Even when we put in Greece and Rome,
is these barriers like the connexions between we all know that the Ptolemaic dynasty is impure connexion just to Cleopatra with the Romans.
Why are we not then studying what's going on in Egypt at the time? Why are we only studying what's going on in Rome?
We can't I just don't understand how you can study history within this tiny little vacuum and do just a little plug there.
Do go listen to our podcast on disrupting on how Egypt disrupts Samejima,
because I think it is very well a lot of these questions, a lot of these copouts.
I mean, it's exactly what they are is copouts and why why we should be engaging.
But you certainly want someone who did engage and created the question because
society classes of colour and that was really influential within the university,
though only founded, as you say, just a couple of years ago to talk to me about about why you found that society and also the kind of the kind of work
that that society does and the interesting sort of two step process you have that you that you've talked to me about.
Yeah. So I'm I'm very proud of this. I'm very proud.
I was sort of I just finished my second year and I was working on the unique some school which does lots of
access work with or state school students and deprive students who want to have the grades to get into Oxbridge.
But there might be other barriers that often economic barriers or socioeconomic barriers.
And some school that was on race and we were talking about it and that was the first
time in my degree that I had come across anything vaguely related to race in Classic's.
That was the first time I found out anything about the colonial links between classics.
I'd been there two years already. You know, that was the first time I had ever thought about the fact that media, for example,
could be really interesting for the diaspora in terms of identity and isolation and being transported away from your home.
You know, all of these ideas I had never come across two years into my degree and I was talking to the then outreach officer and he said, look,
we just got a Facebook group for the campus of the university that should be turned into an actual society, into something that doesn't.
So I went away and made a mind map then and there I was like, this is what I foresee.
I would like to do something to make to make this happen, because how have I managed to get this far without knowing about this stuff?
This stuff is really fascinating. And I started the society then and then myself made made the Twitter.
We go over a thousand followers within four days. So there is a real appetite for this stuff.
This is not something that is just like a small or side project.
This is something that people want and are interested in, obviously.
And I had I sent out a call just because I thought it would be really cool to get some lectures.
I don't know if I'll be able to find any academics who want to. We had so many that we had to schedule two for each session.
We did three three talks in our first term.
This is two months after setting up and had two academics to talk and I had to
turn away something like twenty academics from around the world who were sending.
CVS and I felt very underqualified these days, post docs saying, oh,
we would love to speak, I'd love to speak for you guys, and it just rocketed from there.
And we as I set this up, I went, I want this to be two different things.
I want this to support classes of colour at the university.
There are not that many of us at all.
I want this to be something to support them and also to grow this network around the country and now actually the world of classes of colour,
people within the field who are trying to study it because of these problems within the scholarship,
as I've already talked about, you know, the history of Catholics as a discipline and like going against that.
But also I wanted to bring some light to and to like so what's the word like focus on the voices that we don't hear,
those marginalised voices of the ancient world that we do not hear about and bring those through and amplify them as well.
So there's this sort of two step thing of thinking about the people of colour in the ancient world and making sure we don't forget about them,
but also the people of colour now who are within the discipline or who could be within the discipline.
And that's what the Christian call society does. And we've organised lectures and we do lectures.
We do seminars and talks.
I hand it over now and they've sort of brought in the new committee has been doing some really interesting stuff about colour in the ancient world,
colour of skin, but also colour in art, linking all of these things. They've had discussions about how Hip-Hop can relate to lyric poetry.
There are so many different ways to approach this. We've been doing all the ways we can.
We've also been doing things like we showcase what academics of colours, experiences as academics of colour,
what that means, what that was made in terms of their experiences and faculties,
the racism they've experienced, the difficulties, the barriers,
but also letting people just talk about the stuff they're interested in and that they want to research.
So we're not pigeonholed into only talking about race.
If we don't want to, some of them will come and just be like, yeah, I'm going to talk about this particular tragedy.
And we're like, go for it. That's amazing. So it's been really exciting to see it sort of grow and change.
And I think that you the future, there's so much more that we can do.
I hope that more we can do some more things, but socials and things to really, really build on these networks.
But now I've got contacts across the world who are of colour, who we just can just have a chat about sort of these ancient wild things.
And I wouldn't we wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for Christian society.
And yet I have first year or people coming day like, oh, my goodness, you know, how long has it been running?
And I say, I started it in my second year. You know, it's a year and a half old.
It's a very, very, very young society for all it's done.
And I find that the faculty hasn't been the most supportive with this.
And I just think it's very interesting that me, as an undergrad on my own,
was able to start this, get people in to talk, get us know and get our name out there.
So the people are asking to speak for us. And I feel like we've done more as a society than the faculty has been.
I don't know how many hundred years, but OK. I think as is always the case, as we proved with Madea originally and also as we continue to do now.
But so maybe as soon as you create the space, it is always, always, always full.
There is never an instance.
I can I can remember in my own experience of speaking to so many people where they created a space for diverse people and then no one showed up.
It's just not a thing. It never happened.
And as you rightly point out, you know, you did it in one and a half years without resource, certainly not a wealth of resource.
Some of these universities do have. And you have managed to you know, I've certainly seen some of these incredible, incredible tools.
You've managed to to to line up an absolute wealth of individuals who are already qualified to talk about these things.
And please do go follow them. The question, because society all of our links will be attached to the podcast.
So make sure that you keep in touch with the work they're doing and perhaps think about sending the students out there listening to this.
Think about how you can engage with a lot of the things that the kind of work that they're doing.
But as you pointed out just now, you know, you've managed to make a lot of change in a pretty short period of time.
Why is it the classics outreach is not managing to make even even a tenth of that change?
What is the problem with this success and outreach?
Why is it not succeeding if there is such a wealth, people out there who can engage with this topic?
The first thing is going about something I've already said is accepting that there's a problem in the first place has been has been a major issue.
If you do not accept that there's already a problem, then how on earth are we going to fix it?
And there have been letters and things written. There have been lots of things.
And they always get sort of swept under the rug or we get, again told to, you know,
we must listen to all different sides of the viewpoints or or there isn't a problem.
There isn't a race problem.
As we all know from the report that just came out, this country is very, very slow to accept that there are problems in its institutions.
Just to jump in there, for those in the US, you may not know, of course, story yet, so we're jumping across across the pond.
Last week, this this being April, the U.K. government released a report stating that there was no evidence of
any institutional racism anywhere in the U.K. So just to put that in context,
this is 20, 21, nine months after one of the biggest race reckonings that we've ever had in our lifetimes for sure.
And let's put that into context of just how extreme this denial as it is in the case of a couple of people pretending that racism isn't an issue.
This is weirdly in a report denying institutional racism, the biggest institution in the UK,
that being the government itself, denying that there is any evidence for institutional racism.
Just to put that in context, for those who aren't so aware of the report, thank you.
And I think that that really does put into the backdrop how how much we've got to fight here,
how much there is left to do, because because this is the backdrop we're working on.
And that is exactly how it works all the way through. So I guess that side to side things, we could actually think that actually could be accessed,
things that we could actually try, because the problem is it's a levels problem.
I think one thing that one of the reasons that access not which is of working is because of the content of the courses currently.
And people do get that sidetracked a lot by curriculum discussions. And I think that's really important and very, very useful.
And we should talk about them here. But we should also remember the curriculum is not the be all and end all.
And what you change your curriculum that is not solving any problems necessarily, but it is one of the ways to do it.
The curriculum doesn't appeal if the curriculum does not appeal to a wide range, if actually not only doesn't appeal,
but actively excludes by its content and by the kinds of things that you're going to have to come across
reading by the fact that you read about slavery without any any critical analysis of what that actually means,
without any discussion about, you know,
you'll be reading about these empires without any discussion of the fact that the British then used that to do their own empires.
If you don't incorporate those kinds of things into the corpus and of course,
it's not going to appeal to you know, a kid from London is not like any other London state.
Comprehensive is not going to be interested in reading some of these things.
And I think that's really, really easy ways we can make this curriculum much more interesting.
I think they can focus on things like reception as soon as I talk to students
on access courses about some of the reception work I do and what reception is,
you know, this idea of how we have how people later in time look back at the ancient world.
They that they perk up, they perk up immediately and they go, oh, that makes a lot of sense because this is how I live.
This is where my parents have come from. And that sounds a lot like what happens in this text.
They can relate to it in a way that they couldn't with just the original. I'm not saying come the originals.
I'm just saying we could add a lot more reception in as a real way to people to connect better with the courses.
I think we need to be studying more people of colour. I think we need to be studying more women.
Just one week on women, you know, in a whole term's worth of essays is ridiculous.
There is a there is a lot that can be done to make the actual curriculum once you get to the
university appeal to a 17 year old when they're looking through subjects that they want to study.
But that can also provide the academic basis that they might want to go into the study or to be interested.
They're not it's not an either or. It's not a mutually exclusive thing. Both can be done.
The other side, of course, is going to be lower down. It's going to be in schools.
We have the a major, major problem with classics outreach is that it is one of the worst state schools of private school ratios.
In terms of students, I think a few years ago, something like it's thirty seven percent state school in Oxford,
that is which is ridiculous, when ninety three percent of the country is is state educated.
And of course,
that is because of a lot of reasons that most of it is to do with the fact that our education system doesn't have classical teaching in state schools.
And of course, the people of colour, the majority of us are in states, states education because of these intersections between class and race,
which we do, of course, have to remember when we when we're talking about these things.
But if we can get more classical education into state schools,
I think that there's much more of a chance of people then wanting to maybe go on and study it in the future,
because how you might study subject you've never heard of. I hadn't heard of it until I was in sixth form.
And I'm I'm now doing my degree when I talk about it back home, people have no clue what I'm studying.
They do not understand. I think most of my family still don't know what I do. And that's partly because it isn't built into our education system.
And I think there's a lot that universities could do with that, with going into schools, with sending students into schools to run sessions.
There is already a project that runs in Oxford like that, the literacy to Latin project.
And I worked on this and I went into a school in East Oxford and I taught a small Latin class once a week.
And none of these students said they knew a bit about the Romans. They knew they existed, but they didn't know much at all.
They learn Latin, they learnt a bit about the ancient world, and they were then saying, oh, this is really cool.
Like maybe when I get older I might look at classics. They could never have done that.
They didn't know what classics was. And if we can't reform the entire curriculum, there aren't going to be classics teachers across the country,
then I think we should use the universities and the university students to
really expand people's access to what classics is and what classics could be.
I think something really important in that last point as well is that,
as we've appreciated more than ever during the pandemic, there is only so much a state school teacher can do.
And if that very state school teacher doesn't have a classical background and knows as little about the classics as other students,
I think it's extremely important to note that therefore, in this instance, perhaps more than others, the burden does fall on universities.
The burden does fall on those with the resources, because the amount of the importance,
as you point out, of this being done at a sort of teen level 13 14 is extremely important.
And yet if you're in a state school, state school like mine, where you know, you don't know a huge amount about classics,
none of the teachers know a huge amount about classics, you're not going to be encouraging tens and tens of students to sign up.
And you cannot expect to teach to bear that burden when also that teacher is bearing the burden of whatever else is going on in that school.
And so the resources this is where the university disconnect of saying, well, it's not really my responsibility.
And in many ways and I perhaps would agree with that in other subjects,
maybe it isn't the university's responsibility to be dealing with pre GCSE students.
The university has to do with itself.
But if know wants to stay alive as a subject and that's the simple fact is that if Classic's wants to be taught in any serious way in 50 years time,
this is an instance where it is only the interests of everyone to certainly everybody in classics.
But I think really everyone in general to to to to to to engage and actively engage
with those younger students who and the sole reason they're not interested,
the sole reason they're not interested is because they just don't don't know what that is.
And I think what you point out there is the superimportant,
which is the second you tell them and we see that through books like Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief,
I read How to Train Your Dragon when a young kid.
And then when I saw old English on the Oxford on the Oxford,
I studied English literature on the Oxford course, I was a bit like, oh, there's a connexion there.
And it's incredible how much these these young experiences do effect what you end up studying.
And I think it's really important that we engage in that. Absolutely could not agree more.
I think it's it's no coincidence that most of the people who had even heard of classics
or who are now studying classics at some point read a book like Percy Jackson,
which is a reception text. It's a text that is using the ancient world, but bringing it into a different sphere.
Now, Percy Jackson itself, there are lots of problems with some of the things that it might say.
There are some elements of it that I don't personally agree with because of some issues with Catholics and Western civilisation.
That aside, we could very easily harness the interest of a lot of students and through reception texts.
I think that that is really something that we're missing out on currently. There are loads that are around.
There are receptions of the classics done by Caribbean authors, by African authors, by Indian authors,
but by every single ethnicity I can think of, every single nationality I can think of.
There are receptions done by those people receiving the classics.
Of course, again, just like the fact that lots of countries across the world are English speaking,
lots of them have links to classics because of empire and because of colonialism.
So they have so the people of those things have just as much of a link to classics as white counterparts in in Britain.
So I think that that's a really, really easy way for people to get interested in classics and to start to know.
And I would love for lists of recommendations from the universities of classical reception, texts that schools could take up and say,
you know, give these students or you could give to an English teacher even to say, you know,
if you've got students who are interested, this could be a really good basis for starting out,
having a bit of an idea about the ancient world, because as a teenager, the only knowledge I had of the Greeks was from Percy Jackson.
And it would be fabulous if I could have used that.
But then also gone on to read something about, I don't know, some some Caribbean poetry about Medusa,
which I've now come across, which is absolutely beautiful and incredible and relates to me as a Jamaican woman.
Now, I think that would be fabulous to sort of bring into the schools, show the young people that it is out there.
It absolutely is. And as you've already said, and I think it's really important,
we shouldn't be surprised about young people being interested in classics, young people of colour, young working class people.
We shouldn't be surprised by that. The surprise is. Not about the interest, it's not about like even any aptitude for it or ability in the subject,
people of colour have been studying this subject for hundreds of years.
The surprise is all about that, and it's about access to the things that is the problem.
These people aren't interested, not because they aren't interested or they're apathetic or any biological reason, which I've also heard.
I've also heard is as a reason. Yes, but because they have been excluded from the facilities or the institutions that can teach them those,
as soon as you break those institutions down, the accessibility that people are more than interested in studying these things.
I think that what we've just done is pointed out a way forward, perhaps a positive way to start,
including students and certainly young students of colour in this whole conversation, can you perhaps think of do you have any idea recommend?
I mean, the answer is very well, maybe no. But do you have any sort of other recommendations of things that that people can be doing,
whether that be institutions or individuals, to to start bringing people?
And this is I think this is a one one, I'm sure many brilliant ideas of how to it's something that I can imagine would have appealed to me
as somebody who never dreamed to study classics and yet is sort of currently making a career in it.
But what is you know, do you have any sort of other more positive thoughts about about what could be done that that will work?
Absolutely. I think that we really should utilise the fact that so much has gone online recently and that schools and
counsellors have been trying to make sure that students have Internet access and access to computers.
Of course, that's that's another problem that the pandemic has thrown up.
But because we are in this coronavirus pandemic, so much more is available online, online lectures, which are directed at year 12,
yet that teams that can be accessed by hundreds more students than a normal lecture theatre may have been able to hold.
You can have as many people as you call or a team school as you need to.
It's so much easier to do those kinds of things.
I think that we should be thinking about our curriculum and our extracurricular super curriculum.
Actually, they say in the access world of super curricular activities as more than just reading a book, there are lots and lots of things.
I mean, all the stuff you're doing with media, I mean,
that is that's already an immediate and immediate way for students to get involved in this kind of thing.
Any kinds of podcasts, any kinds of students talking about their experiences of studying classics.
It's all over YouTube, it's all over all of these places.
And I think as soon as you come across those things and a lot of people in the classics world, you know, your own classics or whatever,
they get posted there, look out for them, how to search for them and then send them off and use word of mouth,
send them to teacher friends, send them on to students, emails, schools, make you know,
if you've got time within a faculty, it'll be great to make a list of alternative resources that don't cost anything.
A lot of these are free. A lot of these don't require resources like books which state schools like my books is a big problem.
You can just send these round and people can have much easier access to the stuff that, again, as I say, is out there.
It's just about bringing it to the people. And just a note on that.
And obviously, the medical industry needs to be freely accessible. There can be no paywall, there can be no limitation.
Obviously, Internet poverty is something that both in the states, in the UK has been really, really laid bare this last last year.
And it is an issue that needs to be tackled. Certainly on a governmental level. There is nothing else.
But again, make institutional change with that. But all of these resources that are being made available need to be made freely
available to the students who really don't have any other means to get them.
And that is what is super important.
We cannot be putting even even with with schemes, some fantastic school schemes and things to get people involved in subjects like this.
They will require some kind of payment. And unless they're coming with maths bursary schemes,
they cannot they cannot we cannot make these things subject to economic boundaries because as we all know,
there's economic boundaries always, always, always drastically affect people of colour much more,
which is something that I think is important to point out.
And hopefully and I know we've sort of discussed this hopefully as much as the hostile environment continues,
we also have seen in the last year perhaps the biggest space for this change, for this change to happen.
I mean, this very existence, the existence of our planet,
how many universities and things have signed up to this very podcast series is hopefully an example of of that.
Yeah. And I hope that people have been listening over the past year to all of the people who have come forward.
I think this has been a real surge over the past year, especially since George Floyd last year, of everybody saying enough is enough.
We have absolutely had enough. Again, we are all knackered and we've all been putting so much in.
And I hope people have been really listening to some of these things because a lot of people we're bringing forward ideas as well,
solutions for change, ways that things can be improved as well as flagging the major, major problems.
So, as you say, yeah, there is a real voice now. There's a real space now for people to be heard.
And I hope that we actually are being heard right now as we are speaking a lot louder than we have for a while.
I also hope that sort of people will take from this that, yes, we do need to target the schools.
We do need to increase our diversity. We need to increase of our numbers, our inclusion here.
And we also need to remember that access doesn't stop once you get the students in.
Access also should be continuing throughout while the students are there making sure that that's that the space is prepared for students who are.
Not from typical Catholics backgrounds to be supported while they while they are at the university.
And that's, I think another is another stage of things that we need to be really thinking about is our language courses are history courses.
How many assumptions are being made about people's prior knowledge before when you go into sort of teaching?
Cos I don't know how many sessions I went into and when I wouldn't know that name your classics teacher and classics teacher
where you know or you could borrow this book from your classes department even if schools had a classics department.
So there are there are so many things that we can do to get more students in,
but then also to make sure that that place is an OK place for students to not only exist within five.
That is an incredible point. And I think this has been a really I think a really productive half an hour session.
Discussing is crazy how much we've managed to get in then.
And thank you so much not only for obviously speaking, but to being so honest about both your own experiences in the work that needs to be done.
And I think that what's refreshing from you and from so many people that we've been speaking to through this podcast series,
it's so refreshing to see that there are changes that can be implemented tomorrow.
All we need is the right leadership of people to make those changes.
And I think that the more and more it's proven to be practical and doable and something that that that not only should be done,
but just absolutely needs to be done. And the more I think that we'll be seeing those changes.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Andy. Thank you so much for having me.
This is great.
And thank you so much, everyone, everyone listening in to check out the other other podcast in the series and obviously check out the media film.