LISBON (Reuters) – A postgraduate programme on racism and xenophobia at a top Lisbon university has drawn criticism from advocacy groups for only hiring white teachers, prompting organisers to suspend the course.
The course at NOVA university’s law school, promoted by the government-backed Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia, has also been criticised for some of its content, including a session entitled “Does racism really exist?”.
“It’s absurd to have a ‘post-graduate course on racism and xenophobia’ coordinated entirely by white people and, so far, taught without a single non-white person,” Paula Cardoso, founder of the Afrolink online network for Black professionals in Portugal, wrote on the organisation’s website.
Portuguese anti-racism platform Kilombo said on Facebook that it was “absolutely incomprehensible” for a white person not to question the absence of Black people in the teaching staff of a postgraduate course on racism.
Following the backlash, the university on Tuesday removed the an advertisement for the programme from its website.
Margarida Lima Rego, the law school’s dean, told Reuters on Wednesday that the school tried to recruit teachers from diverse backgrounds but some ended up not being available.
“This was an internal failure and NOVA school of law is already taking measures to ensure this does not happen again,” she said, adding that the course had been suspended.
The observatory did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.
(Reporting by Patrícia Vicente Rua in Lisbon; Additional reporting by Catarina Demony in London; Editing by Ros Russell)
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