Migrant students who challenge UK universities deserve a better deal

Nigerian PhD student Sue Agazie’s partial victory last week in her complaint about her treatment by Newcastle University was a rare triumph in international students’ battles to be treated fairly by UK universities.

Sue, whose doctoral studies were halted by kidney failure and a breakdown in her relationship with her supervisor, has had her tuition fees refunded and been awarded £5,000 in compensation after Newcastle admitted mishandling parts of her complaint.

That compensation is more than merited. As Newcastle admitted, the “breakdown in the supervisor/supervisee relationship” occurred “during the period when there was not a second supervisor in the supervisory team”, while worries about “trying to meet your tuition fee payment responsibilities in addition to the demands to pay for your accommodation…contributed to the anxiety you will have been facing”.

Her experience is similar to that of Egyptian postgraduate Riham Sheble, who was awarded £12,000 in compensation last year after the University of Warwick refused to allow her more time to finish her course when she was diagnosed with cancer.

In both cases, racialised disabled women were subjected to a lengthy university complaint process while severely unwell. This put in jeopardy their visa statuses and, more importantly, their access to the critical care they needed to remain alive.

Both women were supported by the organisation Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC), which I founded in 2016 after I failed to win redress for my own shoddy treatment at the hands of another UK university – after waiting close to a year for the verdict on my internal complaint to be delivered.

More recently, I have spent two years interviewing a sizeable number of migrant black and ethnic minority university staff and students through my project with the Independent Social Research Foundation to understand their treatment. The students described an environment of institutionalised racism and xenophobia, coupled with a lack of robust processes specifically designed for migrant students to complain without affecting their visa statuses. All this suggests that bad supervision and abusive supervisors often go unreported by migrant students, whether they have scholarships or are self-funded.

Universities’ inadequate and opaque complaints processes discourage complaints not only because of their effect on visa status but also because of the sheer time-consuming difficulty of navigating them. Moreover, many migrant student complainants have the impression that universities deliberately draw out those processes in order to exhaust them and imperil their visa statuses.

That view is taken, for instance, by the University of Oxford postgraduate student Lakshmi Balakrishnan, whose complaint about being “forcibly transferred” from a DPhil to a master’s degree was recently rejected by the Office for the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) in October. “I believe that the university’s strategy is to force me to wade through endless appeals and complaints procedures in the hope that I will eventually give up and go,” she told the BBC.

It is striking that many scholars reacted to the BBC’s report by dismissing Balakrishnan as an entitled rich Indian who was simply seeking to buy her doctorate. For many, Balakrishnan, who had spent £100,000 on her studies, was being supremely arrogant in challenging her institution, even though her college and several supervisors attested to her ability to gain a research degree.

The rage against Balakrishnan, in my view, is motivated by her daring to reveal an inconvenient truth about UK academia: that migrant students are being poorly treated not just in “lesser” institutions but even at the likes of Oxford.

Complaints about migrant mistreatment usually create little more than a murmur in the news. Nor do academics themselves seem concerned about such cases. A case is point is the growing number of Nigerian students affected by the collapse of their country’s currency, the naira, earlier this year, leaving them struggling to pay the remainder of their tuition fees. Some of these students, mostly on taught postgraduate courses, have been withdrawn from their courses by their universities, leading to the curtailment of their student visas.

A number of these students protested at institutions including Teesside University and Manchester Metropolitan University. Their complaints, however, went unanswered and largely ignored – perhaps because it is too easy to characterise students at non-Russell Group universities as “bogus”.

This is a gross failure to supply the level of pastoral care that all students, including migrant students, have a right to expect. Despite much hand-wringing over the student mental health crisis, many of these students were locked out of their virtual learning environments, leaving them unable to contact mental health, disability support and other pastoral services on campus.

The UK needs to do much better. After all, the reasons for international students to stop bankrolling its higher education sector are mounting up. Those include the outrageously high visa charges and International Health Surcharge (IHS) fees, August’s race riots and recent doubts about whether the graduate route post-study work visa would continue – not to mention the growing numbers of English-language offerings in other countries, including China and Russia.

Ignoring, obstructing and scorning migrant students’ complaints will only increase international students’ incentives to go elsewhere – leaving a UK university sector that is already in financial crisis staring into the abyss.

Sanaz Raji is an independent scholar and visiting researcher at Northumbria University’s department of geography and environmental sciences. She is the founder of Unis Resist Border Controls, a national, migrant-led campaign working to support both migrant students and migrant university staff.