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To say the number of people who've been no platformed or sacked or something isn't the whole issue at all. You know, the issue is the culture.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kitchen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a lecturer and writer, Dr. Jim Butcher. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks for coming on. You are a part of the Don't Divide Us campaign, which we'll get into in a second. And we really wanted to talk to you about the race equality charter in British universities. Before we do that, tell everybody a little bit about who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

Well, that's a great question. I'll keep it brief. Well, I'm from Derby in the East Midlands originally. I worked in further education for around 10 years in the West Midlands in Birmingham.

And I've been down at Canterbury, at Canterbury Cross Beach University for the last 20 years. Over most of that time, I've been involved in the UCU trade union as a rep.

I'm a big football fan. I'll mention the team, so I really can have a good laugh Derby County.

And I also volunteer with an asylum charity and sort of mentor a young man who's come over here.

And I mentioned the race equality charter, which we'll get into in a second, but you've been in further education that sounds like most of your adult life.

Yeah, further education for 10 years, higher education university sector for about 20. I am that old.

Well, your age aside, what I'm really trying to get it into is you've been in that part of our society for a long time.

What have you observed in your time in that field? What have you noticed? What have been some of the big trends that you've noticed over the last 20, 30 years?

Well, some incredible trends really. I mean, I mean, one that I'll skirt over because it's not perhaps so central to what we're talking about here is the growth of the use of the internet.

When I started out, we still had paper memos three a week that you look at and put in the bin.

10 years later, it's 30 emails a day that you must answer because people know if you've not not read them and things like that.

But I think the most significant change has been how education has become very instrumental in relation to all sorts of other things.

It's never about the knowledge now and the skills and the thing that you love and that the students want to learn about.

You're always answerable to some metric, some graph or something like that.

I think for a lot of the time in FE that became a kind of bureaucratic burden, but I think the thing that's really taken off in the last 15 years perhaps is the growth of exactly the same thing.

The same thing, a kind of managerialism, a tick box mentality, a whole load of bureaucracy and a whole load of kind of instrumental goals that we have to meet related to so called social justice.

And the one of course we're talking about today is race, but other things as well.

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