War, elitism, racism: The Aussie taking Oxford uni’s hot topics off the boil

It is dinner time mid-week, just before term break at Oxford, and we are sitting at the high table in the splendid old dining hall at Balliol, which claims to be the University of Oxford’s ­oldest ­college. A community of scholars has ­existed on this site since 1263, and tonight Professor Tim Soutphommasane is the fellow presiding, shushing the hubbub of voices with a sharp rap of a gavel before ­saying the minimalist Latin grace – “Benedictus bene­dicat” – and inviting students to sit down to supper.

Despite his traditional academic robes, dark suit, tie and serious glasses, Australia’s former race discrimination commissioner looks no different to the fresh-faced young PhD student I invited to dinner in London nearly 13 years ago.

A graduate of the University of Sydney, he was living at Balliol after completing a Master of Philosophy and was well into his doctorate in political theory. I was the Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age at the time and remember being struck by his quiet composure and the infectious ­brilliance with which he spoke about his ­thesis research, examining notions of national identity and proposing a new, nuanced form of patriotism. There was great prescience in his argument that political ­progressives had, at their peril, surrendered notions of belonging and national pride to the political right and that the time had come to reclaim this ground.

Soutphommasane, 42, turned his thesis into a book, published in 2009, and returned home to Australia the following year to take up a post at Monash University. However, it wasn’t long after that his ideas caught the eye of the then influential British Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who’d been commissioned to ­conduct a comprehensive review of party policies by the newly fledged Labour leader, Ed Miliband. The young Aussie postgraduate found himself talking about a “new liberal patriotism” amid Labour’s brainstorming sessions as the party debated the role the British state should play in helping its citizens live secure, fulfilled lives. Their optimistic vision of a society of shared obligation and reward failed to ignite the ­electorate, however, and in 2015, Labour ­suffered a devastating defeat.

Fast forward a decade and the UK has ­farewelled five Conservative prime ministers; slammed the door on the European Union with disastrous economic, trade and labour repercussions; and staggered, deeply ­wounded, out of the global pandemic.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Soutphommasane had written another four books, worked at the University of Sydney, married Sarah, a fellow university administrator, and had a son, Danton. He also served as an outspoken race discrimination commissioner between 2013 and 2018, successfully battling Coalition government attempts to water down sections of race legislation deemed to stymie “free speech”. Now he has now circled back to his alma mater, this time as its chief diversity officer – the first in the institution’s 930-odd-year history.

Marc Stears, political author and strategist, is now director of the University College London Policy Lab, which puts top academic thinkers together with those at the front line leading social, political or economic change. He was Soutphommasane’s master’s tutor when he was professor of political theory at Oxford and later examined his PhD. Soutphommasane was, he says, not only a very good student but a “rare one”, displaying a reflectiveness and a mature grasp of ­political nuance and complexity early on. “He didn’t take a very strong position and argue bullishly to try and display some sort of virtuosity,” Stears says. “He was capable of writing clearly about really complicated things and had the capacity to see various different points of view, which has stood him in good stead in the jobs he’s taken.”

And the current post could not be trickier. “I mean, this is the biggest, hardest job apart from the vice chancellor itself, I guess. He’s got the internal ­complexities of Oxford to deal with and issues of ­equality and diversity which have become so highly charged … so many people become polarised so quickly and it’s extraordinarily difficult to navigate. So far, he’s done so with great success.”

When we meet for our first interview over college supper, Soutphommasane has been in the job for 15 months. It’s clear that Oxford, like most big univer­sities, is feeling the reverberation of geopolitical ­turbulence, from Israel and Palestine to the continuing war of words over free speech, trans rights and so‑called cancel ­culture. The creation of his post was itself a recommendation of the task force on race ­equality set up in 2020 by Louise Richardson, the then vice chancellor, as the Black Lives Matter movement spread across the Atlantic following the death of George Floyd.

Black Lives Matter protesters at Oxford University in 2020 demand the removal of a statue of imperialist mining magnate Cecil Rhodes.Credit: Alamy

Several ferocious debates polarised the university, among them demands that Oriel College, the oldest royal foundation at the university, remove a statue of benefactor Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate, avowed white supremacist and colonialist founder of Rhodesia. College administrators refused, sparking yet another wave of protest. Last year, the Oxford Union (the ­student debating society) also made global headlines when activists disrupted a speech by Dr Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who’d already been forced to leave her job as professor at the University of Sussex after angry student demonstrations and a barrage of online vitriol. Stock, 52, herself out and gay, believes biological sex in humans is both real and socially ­salient, views she published in a book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, that were perceived by some as trans-exclusionary, which she denies.

In May, 16 Oxford students were arrested when they staged a pro-Palestine sit-in at university offices, and a month later, some exams were cancelled after ­protesters stormed a building on campus. But if Soutphommasane is feeling the heat, he’s not showing it. “It is a really difficult time everywhere, isn’t it?” he says. “We are in an age of culture-war debates but I believe universities have an important role in guiding and helping societies learn and understand how they should be thinking about these issues. Kathleen Stock was the subject of enormous internal debate, but we came out of that making clear that there does not have to be a trade-off between a commitment to free speech and a commitment to equality and diversity.“

Soutphommasane adds that since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response, he and colleagues have met regularly with Muslim, Jewish and “all the other students who have views about the conflict”: “Our message there has also been unequivocal support for free speech, for differing views, for robust debate – and unequivocal condemnation of discrimination, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”

He mentions that just hours before this ­meeting, university administrators gave notice to the last of two pro-Palestine encampments, set up last May outside the historic Bodleian Library and the Natural History Museum.

Managing the welfare of Jewish and Muslim students in this climate seems an impossible task, and reminds me of the ominous news­paper headline warning of frying pans and fire when news broke that he was leaving Australia to lead Oxford’s equality strategy. Just last month, during a combative federal Senate hearing, University of Sydney vice chancellor Mark Scott apologised to Jewish staff and students who’d alleged breaches of workplace health and safety laws, including failure to prevent the bullying, harassment and “psychosocial harm” of Jewish people on campus.

Pro-Palestinian encampments set up on the university grounds in May had dispersed voluntarily by July.Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

It dawns on me some weeks after we speak that the notice-to-vacate deadline had passed with seemingly little controversy. Soutphommasane confirms by email that the encampments closed “voluntarily without court action”. One of his colleagues tells me later that the uneventful closures were helped by the vice chancellor and senior staff’s support for negotiation and open dialogue – and also by Soutphommasane’s capacity to stay cool and objective amid heated debate.

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Anyone who walks the golden streets of Oxford cannot help but be bewitched by the sense of romance and history etched into the sandstone streetscape. The oldest colleges have been around for close to a millennium. Weathered, walled gardens and quadrangles, gnarled wisteria vines, turrets and stone mullion ­windows, tutorials and vigorous intellectual debate in wood-panelled studies – for the visitor, it all feels ­impossibly idyllic, an academia from central casting.

Behind the beauty and tradition, however, lies an ­administrative structure as maze-like as the cobbled laneways that surround the colleges. Departments and faculties funded by the central university body deliver laboratories and lectures, while the 36 self-governing undergraduate colleges are responsible for admitting students and delivering the distinctive tutorials for which Oxford is known. Academics usually have a ­position or professorship within their faculty as well as a fellowship of one of the colleges.

‘People fear and are being criticised for saying the wrong thing and making a mistake.’

Tim Soutphommasane

Along with its rival, Cambridge, Oxford has been a springboard of the professional elite for several centuries and its graduates hold top positions in politics, law, science and media around the world. Of Britain’s 58 prime ministers, 31 graduated from Oxford, as did six of Australia’s last 13 PMs.
Debate about social mobility in the UK ­inevitably draws questions about its student ­diversity, although the most recent statistics are heartening and show that over two-thirds of students admitted to Oxford last year went to state school, compared with 62.3 per cent in 2019. That said, just six per cent of British ­students are educated in private schools compared with more than 36 per cent in Australia, a difference that takes a little gloss off the stats. Still, racial diversity has also improved and in 2023, 29 per cent identified as BME (black and minority ethnic) compared to 22 per cent in 2019.

Soutphommasane says that overall last year, 38.7 per cent of the total student population, including graduates, were of BME background. However, there is still work to do in staff diversity, and while this has risen to 17 per cent identifying as BME in 2023, a higher proportion are found among the lower pay grades.

Soutphommasane appears palpably upbeat for someone usually so measured and it emerges that he’s putting the ­finishing touches to a comprehensive new research report which examines 6000 Britons’ attitudes to equality, diversity and ­inclusion (EDI) initiatives. Co-authored with Stears at UCL Policy Lab and the UK non-profit think tank More in Common, the results seem to have given him a renewed sense of optimism about Britain’s social conscience as well as a powerful snapshot of societal attitudes with which to forge ahead with the job.

“Our research shows that two-thirds of Britons ­believe initiatives on diversity and inclusion are good, and this isn’t limited to the more progressive segments of the UK but across more socially conservative groups too,” he says, waving a fork for emphasis. “What we’re picking up, though, is that people lack confidence in how to have conversations about these issues or in knowing what to say, and that even with the best ­intentions, they fear and are being criticised for saying the wrong thing and making a mistake.”

Soutphommasane, his parents and sister Sara at his doctorate graduation in Oxford in 2010.Credit: Courtesy of Tim

Respondents stated that words such as “woke” and “privilege” are perceived to be unhelpful, serving only to reinforce what they saw as an “us and them” ­dynamic. The key to changing this is an understanding of language, he adds. “What’s striking from this ­research is that even among more conservative segments of British society, those that have undertaken EDI training find it overwhelmingly positive because it gives them practical tools to have conversations with colleagues or neighbours. You need fluency and ­literacy in these areas to feel comfortable …

“The challenge is to generate confidence among staff and students so that over time, the university – indeed, society at large – can find the courage to hold their ground when free speech is challenged and to do that without being distracted by the culture-wars noise.”

‘I wouldn’t anticipate there’s widespread hostility against efforts to promote equality, ­diversity and inclusion in Australia.’

Tim Soutphommasane

A few weeks after our dinner, Soutphommasane emails a Washington Post article that surprises me: it reveals similar positive attitudes among Americans. He agrees this is unexpected, particularly because a US Supreme Court decision last year struck down ­affirmative action in the country’s college admissions system. The ruling unleashed a broad, conservative attack on corporate efforts to achieve diversity in America, and many Republican-led state legislatures introduced anti-EDI bills, signalling use of the issue as a wedge in the upcoming presidential election.

So, does Soutphommasane think that Australian ­research would yield related ­support for equality and diversity programs? There’s a long pause before he answers. “It’s a good question and maybe I should do that as part of future research. I wouldn’t anticipate there’s widespread hostility against efforts to promote equality, ­diversity and inclusion in Australia. The value of a ‘fair go’ runs deep in Australian culture, so I wouldn’t ­expect outright hostility.” But outright ­hostility, surely, is very different to polling that suggests Brits and, ­indeed, Americans don’t see these issues in zero-sum terms and feel EDI strategies are good for society and individuals? He pauses once more. “I’d say, again, that we shouldn’t mistake political and media debates about culture and identity to be entirely ­representative of what societal attitudes are.”

Soutphommasane’s reluctance to be drawn too much on Australian attitudes makes me wonder if he feels a modicum of relief being 17,000 kilometres away from the firing line of thundering columnists and radio shock jocks at home. Being based in the UK for 15 years, I hadn’t realised just how febrile and vitriolic the public debate became in the final years he was race commissioner. Trawling ­backwards on Twitter/X, I felt genuine shock at the online attacks and sheer level of invective hurled at him by a ­handful of writers, particularly in their ­defence of the late cartoonist for The Australian, Bill Leak, who penned a notorious sketch suggesting Aboriginal ­fathers are drunks, and some don’t even know their children’s names. Lauded as a victory against political correctness and for “telling it like it is” by some commentators, it was just as widely condemned by other academics, journalists and writers for being racist and hateful. Soutphommasane effectively became the lightning rod for Leak supporters when he used his official Facebook page to remind people they had a legal right to complain, while also reminding them that they may not succeed.

Twitter/X opprobrium was reignited some years later when he questioned Australia’s “Fortress Australia” mentality during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that lockdown should be a last – not first – resort.

I ask him about that period and he acknowledges it was difficult, then deftly switches to my next question about how he spends his downtime and weekends in Oxford. (He’s very much enjoying the bucolic life and exploring the English ­countryside; remains passionate about cricket – he was captain of the Balliol XI but now ­restricts himself to teaching son Danton how to bat and bowl; and loves living close to The Trout Inn, one of Oxford’s legendary, riverside, old stone pubs. His only complaint is that Danton, 7, is “starting to pick up an English accent”.) I’m told he can be a devastating mimic of both Australian and UK political ­figures and that these occasionally ­pop up ­during PowerPoint presentations, but he refuses to venture into that ­territory, either.

Soutphommasane with wife Sarah and son Danton, who is picking up an English accent.Credit: Courtesy of Tim

The novelist and veteran political speechwriter, Dr Dennis Glover, was ­setting up the progressive Melbourne think tank, Per Capita, when he first met Soutphommasane. He’d returned from Oxford not long prior and asked Glover if he could join the group of bright, young thinkers who’d coalesced around Per Capita, conducting some of its earliest research. Many of this circle remain close to Soutphommasane, including Melbourne lawyer Josh Bornstein, ­policy analyst and lawyer Emily Millane and businessman Tony Kitchener.

Glover says there was a time when Soutphommasane was race commissioner that his friends became ­anxious about his welfare: “They really went for him you know … it got quite hairy and it’s ­natural to worry about safety. But he really was OK: the thing is he’s really, really tough. I think in some ways, he … well, thrived isn’t the word … he gained strength from the fact that people were out to get him. It made him feel that he was doing the right thing.” Glover, who has a PhD in history at Cambridge, is not one for superlatives but is adamant Soutphommasane is now one of the leading thinkers on race discrimination globally – “and it’s a pretty ­crowded field”.

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Soutphommasane’s early life must have contributed to the distinctive and intimate lens through which he examined issues of race and diversity in his studies and which now informs his professional life. Born in 1982 in Montpellier, France, he is the son of refugees, both medical students, who fled Laos in the year of the 1975 Communist takeover. Convinced they would struggle to really belong in French society, they decided to emigrate to Australia when their boy was three and settled into a new life in western Sydney.

Tim with his mum and dad in Sydney in 1986.Credit: Courtesy of Tim Soutphommasane

His parents trained and worked as registered nurses and a second child, Sara, was born eight years later. Both children ­attended the local primary school, but when he started year 7 at the academically selective Hurlstone Agricultural High, Soutphommasane found ­himself the only Southeast Asian student. He has a vivid memory of a school ANZAC Day ceremony at which he understood and acknowledged his fellow students’ emotion about their military forbears’ sacrifice in defence of the Australian way of life, while coming to the stark realisation that those were feelings he couldn’t relate to in any way. Not only had his antecedents never fought a war for Australia but it was possible that his schoolfriends’ grandfathers had defended the White Australia policy as well. A rigorous, adult examination of national pride in societies where common history cannot be taken for granted seems to be a natural evolution from his lived experience.

‘I very much have to practise what I’ve been preaching over the years.’

Tim Soutphommasane

Today, ensconced in the heart of British academia, Soutphommasane sees himself as a first-generation Australian, remains adamant that dual citizenship is not for him and is comfortably reconciled with the ­notion that you can inherit traditions and live up to the best of them even if you weren’t born into them. I ask if he, like me, initially found the nuances of British language and social interaction confusing to decipher and whether he, too, read the English anthropologist Kate Fox’s brilliant ­explanatory tome Watching the English. (He did read it, adding that he had to edit more than a third of his ­doctoral thesis in the final three weeks because he ­misunderstood that his PhD supervisor’s “small, minor notes” actually meant “rewrite the bloody thing”.)

“The linguistic and cultural differences are fascinating,” he says. “There is so much potential for misunderstanding, even though we speak the same language. I’ve had to learn to read between the lines again, learn to ­understand what colleagues are saying – and not saying.” For example, he continues, if “a colleague asks, ‘Have you read this book’ by another colleague, and I answer, ‘Yeah, it’s interesting’ – from their response I realise that for them, ‘it’s interesting’ implies a veiled criticism and that what I’m actually expressing is that it’s a terrible book. For us Australians, ­interesting really means we’re interested.”

Or there are phrases such as, “I’m terribly sorry”. “For me, that implies I’m really sorry, but for an English person that can be read as you ­expressing a form of passive aggression or being disingenuous, and you’re ­actually saying you’re not sorry at all in some contexts. I very much have to practise what I’ve been preaching over the years, a case of me having to live cultural diversity in a certain way. I guess another way of saying it is that I live life every day as an anthropologist, in a good way of course.”

Colleagues observe that in the UK Soutphommasane appears to have so far deliberately eschewed the role of public intellectual, something he’d embraced with ­relish in Australia, instead focusing solely on Oxford and the job at hand. Cultural trans­formation is, of course, always a slow process, difficult to assess and measure and requiring sustained commitment and investment. Eighteen months into his five-year contract, insiders say he’s managed to quietly upend an area too often relegated to HR training modules and set up new systems of communication, ­including regular roundtables at which students, academic and administrative staff gather for face-to-face discussion.

Soutphommasane describes the approach as being more like executive education or coaching. New ­students, for example, are presented with a series of storylines around race or nationality – situations they might encounter at the dinner table, the pub or in the lecture theatre – and join forces at induction to thrash out how to ­respond. So far, students report they’ve enjoyed the experience.

Oxford’s colleges are great laboratories in which to test new ideas and tactics, Soutphommasane says, and he hopes that, in time, they can then become models for broader cultural and organisational innovation. He’s just a few weeks away from releasing what he informally describes as “EDI Version 2.0” to update Oxford’s policies and ­practice beyond just diversity to an “inclusive culture where everyone can belong”.

David Isaac, provost of Worcester College, was on the panel that interviewed and appointed Soutphommasane to the job and works closely with him now. A lawyer, Isaac chaired the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission from 2016-20 and the ­charity Stonewall from 2003-12. He’s an unabashed “big fan” of his young colleague. “It has been a complicated time of ­culture wars and you’re dealing with an ancient British institution that is also trying to embrace change and be more modern,” he says. “We want to get away from the elitist reputation Oxford used to have while remaining an elite university, intent on ­getting the very best talent and the best people from all backgrounds. Tim knows that you achieve that not by scaring people but by building support and confidence … by selling the proposition in a non-adversarial way.”

So, does academia beckon him post Oxford or could it even be politics? Soutphommasane insists he’s ­thinking only about the present and his commitment to Oxford. But, for a brief moment, he can’t resist looking back: “A little over a decade ago, when I was writing about patriotism here in the UK, it would have been anathema to see a Labour leader … as we’ve seen in Keir Starmer … speak regularly in front of the Union Jack or to express a sense of patriotism,” he says. “That sounds a bit triumphant … but you know, I think sometimes political arguments need time to be absorbed into ­political culture, right? Ideas that sound unpopular or even heretical at some point … in time they may turn into conventional wisdom.”

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