Students have campaigned against relics of their university’s colonial history, including a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford

Black students’ progress is being stalled by university tutors who are “60-year-old white men” and “potentially racist”, according to students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London.

In a report called Degrees of Racism, the student union demands that “all academics must be prepared to acknowledge that they are capable of racism”.

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It claims unconscious bias is rife at the school — part of the University of London — and that white tutors allow white male students to dominate class discussions and have lower expectations of black and ethnic minority (BME) students because of “racist stereotypes of people of colour as less capable, or lazy”.

The claims drew an angry response. Sir Anthony Seldon, 63, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, said: “White