This is the long form piece by Sanaz Raji, following the edited piece that was published in the Times Higher Education, 20 December 2024.
Eleven years ago I launched a public campaign as a migrant PhD student at the University of Leeds. This campaign happened when the third year of my scholarship funding was rescinded, only two weeks from the start of the 2011-2012 enrolment period. Funding was pulled in breach of the university’s rules. I was expected to find £13,700 in four weeks’ time before the end of the enrolment period in order to finish my PhD research. This incident followed a campaign of victimisation that I experienced during the start of my PhD. Three requests for a change of my primary PhD supervisor were denied. I was forced into a supervisory arrangement that did not work. During this period, I had a number of health problems that my supervisory team weaponised against me. I was forced to work while unwell. The department claimed that I wasn’t making sufficient academic progress. However, they created the consistent barriers that prevented me from advancing with my research. Taking away funding at the third year into the PhD and expecting me to locate funding quickly to meet the enrolment deadline was a most convenient and vicious way for my primary supervisor to appear blameless while they offloaded me from the department.
Despite requesting the university to keep my enrolment open as I made frantic attempts to find sources of funding, I was withdrawn without my knowledge. I fell into a deep depression. My immigration status was put into limbo and for close to a year I was one of the hidden homeless, couch-surfing from friend to friend.
Through the support of some PhD colleagues and students, I was encouraged to challenge my department’s decision. I launched protests, an online petition endorsed by 1,253 supporters, and challenged the Vice Chancellor in person. Through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, it was found that privately my supervisory team along with the head of the department made a series of vitriolic personal attacks against me, with my primary supervisor wishing that I fail to remain in the UK to see my case through. With the addition of the FOI evidence, and the support of pro-bono legal assistance, I was granted legal aid to submit a judicial review against the OIA decision. Unfortunately the judicial review side of my case was prevented on a legal technicality of not being within the time limit. To come so far and to be denied justice was both disheartening and undeniably frustrating.
I took my own experience, as well as the experiences of a significant number of migrant students who personally reached out to me for support and advice, and in March 2016 established a migrant-led, grassroots, national campaign in UK higher education, Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC). In the eight years of operation, URBC has consistently sounded the alarm of how Hostile Environment policy is being implemented in universities and creating a number of inequalities, particularly for racialised migrant students. One example of this inequality are the barriers for migrant students launching complaints. In 2019, URBC published a study on the Hostile Environment policy in UK higher education found that BAME migrant staff and students were often subjected to “retaliatory and escalating hostility in response to complaints.” And when migrant students launch complaints, universities are quick to weaponise the precarious immigration status of migrant student complaints. This happened to me when I complained about my treatment at the University of Leeds. Most recently, the weaponisation of one’s student visas can be seen in the case of Sue Agazie at Newcastle University and previously with the case of Riham Sheble at the University of Warwick. That two racialised disabled women in higher education were subjected to a lengthy university complaint process while severely unwell, under the threat of being removed from the UK and more importantly, the threat of being denied access to the critical care needed to remain alive, all point to the specific precarities that migrant students, especially those with disabilities, experience in the UK.
The online backlash that Lakshmi Balakrishnan, a Oxford University student experienced for publicising her case to the BBC, against being “forcibly transferred” from a PhD into a masters degree without her consent, illustrates yet again that no matter one’s perceived privilege, the complaints system is unfair to all migrant student. The thread presented by URBC on X/Twitter went viral for illustrating how unfair the complaints process is and the structural barriers that make it more difficult for migrant students to launch a complaint. The academic chatter concerning Balakrishnan revealed what Chisomo Kalinga correctly identified as academics “showing their asses” and revealing their racism and woeful lack of knowledge to the experiences of migrant students. Had these academics, especially some of those who claim to be invested in decolonisation, read Queen’s College Oxford’s supporting statement, it should have raised a number of red flags concerning the supervisory and pastoral care given to Balakrishnan. For two years I have conducted fieldwork through my project with the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) to understand how migrant students and staff are treated in UK higher education. I’ve interviewed a number of racialised migrant students. These students indicate that the heightened environment of institutionalised racism and xenophobia, coupled with a lack of robust processes specifically for migrant students to complain without affecting their visa status suggests that bad supervision and abusive supervisors often are unreported by migrant students, whether they have a scholarship and thus, are funded or are self-funding their studies. As someone who had waited close to a year for a decision concerning my internal complaint against the University of Leeds, Balakrishnan is correct in stating, “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.” Universities not only weaponise visas, but they weaponise the complaints process by deliberately making it an opaque system in order to exhaust the complainant. Universities intentionally draw out the internal complaint process knowing that the migrant student has limited time to remain lawfully in the UK before their student visa expires. This is a rather sly way to prevent migrant students from successfully seeing their case through other legal means.
Importantly, the vitriol directed at Balakrishnan, as Gargi Bhattacharyya illustrates, shows a concerted “Disdain (or colonial patronising) of international students.” This was evident in Balakrishnan’s case when she was falsely presented by some on X/Twitter as trying to purchase a PhD by indicating that she had spent £100,000 to study at Oxford University. What is obvious was how a number of academics remain oblivious to the outrageously high visas and International Health Surcharge (IHS) fees that migrant students must pay, in addition that student visa holders have no recourse to public funds and must prove that they have ample funds to be able to study in the UK, coupled with paying higher tuition fees than that of their home student peers. By talking about the high costs involved in studying in the UK, Balakrishnan points to this issue outlined by this tweet, “People keep talking about students acting like consumers, well universities are also happily engaging with that relationship, taking money without any due diligence.” The lack of due diligence is also related to inadequate pastoral care for migrant students. We saw a stark example of this problem over the summer when a growing number of Nigerian students impacted by the naira currency collapse had problems paying the remainder of their tuition fees. Some of these students, mostly on taught postgraduate courses, were being forcibly withdrawn from their course that led to the curtailment of their student visas. A number of these students protested at institutions like Teesside University and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Their complaints went unanswered and often completely ignored. In a study conducted by URBC at MMU it was found that of the Nigerian students who responded, 29% experienced mental health issues directly because of the constant threat of losing their university place as a result of being unable to pay their tuition fees. Because these students were locked out of their Moodle, they had no ability to contact mental health, disability support and other pastoral services on campus about their worsening mental health situation. The dissonance within UK academia was evident in that there was little outcry that students were being removed from the UK for simply being unable to pay their tuition fees due to rapid currency devaluation that was out of their control. The rage against Balakrishnan for disclosing her mistreatment at Oxford University is because she dared to reveal the marketised dynamics disenfranchising migrant students that most academics erroneously believe are reserved for lesser Russell Group and post-92 universities also happens in UK’s most prestigious university. It is also why there was little mobilisation from academics concerning Nigerian students being withdrawn, facing visa curtailment, and removal because these students are seen in a typically racist and right-wing manner as “bogus students” to be studying at a post-92 university. This brings us to this fundamental point missing from the online discussions concerning Balakrishnan’s case that links directly to the treatment of Nigerian students- that academics who are harmed by neoliberal dynamics in UK higher education seemingly expect migrant students to put up and shut up with their mistreatment.
UK higher education is at a precipice. International students are no longer coming to study in the UK as they once did. With a significant decrease in migrant student numbers, a number of universities are making redundant staff and closing down courses. Newcastle University, for example, is now saddled with a £35 million loss income. Selling UK higher education on the back of the Graduate Visa Scheme isn’t enticing prospective migrant students when because of international racist structures, they face additional barriers in finding work in their field of study. This August’s race riots, increases to visa, IHS and tuition fees, the treatment of migrant students involved in Palestine activism, such as the case of Dana Abuqamar, in addition to universities not divesting from the on-going genocide in Gaza, along with migrant students who have struggled under the weight of the Hostile Environment and the equally racist way that marketised higher education treats them as an unlimited ATM card all are showing the UK to not be a world leading place to further one’s studies. As China increases its standing in the world university league tables and Russia seeks to entice migrant students with package deals, there are other options to access English language university courses beyond the UK, North American and European model of university education. Ignoring migrant student complaints while creating barriers for international students to complain and treating these complaints with scorn and derision perfectly encapsulates just one aspect of the current dysfunctional system of the UK international higher education. Don’t shoot down those migrant students who raise their heads above the pulpit in challenging institutional negligence and the bigotry they experience. The problem is directly with a rotting colonial foundation that treats these students in a racist, xenophobic and ableist manner, fleecing them for their tuition fees and preventing them from effectively challenging their mistreatment.
Sanaz Raji s an independent scholar and visiting researcher at Northumbria University. She is the founder of Unis Resist Border Controls, a national, migrant-led campaign working to support both migrant students and migrant university staff.