Cambridge University is running a “reverse mentoring” scheme for staff to combat “structural racism”.

Under the project, white senior academics and management staff are assigned one of their black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) colleagues as a mentor in order to encourage “institutional change” at the university.

It is part of a raft of initiatives that the university’s equality and diversity department has introduced over the past year, aimed at boosting diversity and driving out racism.

Earlier this week, it emerged that a PhD student quit in protest after accusing Cambridge of “pervasive” racism.

Indiana Seresin, 26, said that as a white student she had “benefited from the structural racism” of the university and felt she had an “imperative” to leave.

She said she has witnessed an “accumulation” of racist incidents during her time at the university, and went on to describe an incident where an English lecturer “repeatedly read aloud the n-word during our class discussions”.

Ms Seresin told how this incident, as well as the lack of black lecturers and postdoctoral researchers at Cambridge, left her convinced of the university’s racism.