The lawyer who wants more academics to ‘come out’ as working class

Geraldine Van Bueren, professor of international human rights law at Queen Mary University of London, spent her infancy in the east London borough of Hackney in the days when, as she puts it, nobody pronounced the “h”. Her father, later a taxi driver, worked in local factories, and her mother was a bookkeeper at Smithfield meat market. Though she doesn’t have the accent, she is a cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells.

But her working-class background was something she kept quiet about among academic colleagues. Then one day, she recalls, a distressed student came to see her “torn between what she wanted to be and her community, friends and family”. When Van Bueren told her, “I understand what you’re going through”, the student leapt up and shouted: “How dare you? You couldn’t possibly know.” The student was astonished when Van Bueren said she, too, was working class. “Later, I got shy knocks on the door from other working-class students wanting to talk,” she says.

Now Van Bueren has started the Association of Working Class Academics, which has recently met the vice-chancellors’ body, Universities UK, to discuss how the class backgrounds of British academics could be widened. That, she argues, is essential for students from poor homes to have role models to make them feel they belong at university and help with awkward social adjustments.

But one problem is lack of data. No large-scale study has been done since 1989, when the late Oxford sociologist AH Halsey reported that 17% of academics, but only 13% of professors, had fathers in routine and manual occupations.

I met Van Bueren, a QC, in London’s Doughty Street Chambers, of which she is a member alongside other celebrated liberal barristers such as Amal Clooney and Helena Kennedy. She has the kind of dedication to human rights that sends certain Tory backbenchers apoplectic: she helped to draft the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; she claims Britain is legally bound to pay reparations for the slave trade; she argues that Britain, as a signatory of the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, has violated international law by introducing high university fees. The Human Rights Act, she says, doesn’t go nearly far enough: it should also incorporate rights to food, water, adequate housing, and high health standards.

Her views on what the law should do are diametrically opposite to those of this year’s Reith lecturer, the former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption, who argued that lawyers are usurping the role of politicians.

“In academia, people don’t feel able to talk about their backgrounds freely because they think it will negatively affect their career,” she says. Most of the prejudice is unconscious – such as academics talking about “bog-standard comprehensives” and the need to invite “clubbable” people to university gatherings. Those who complain are accused of having a chip on their shoulder.

More important, perhaps, is young working-class academics’ lack of economic, social and cultural capital. They don’t have a financial cushion to help them through postgraduate study, the hours of unpaid research needed to get published in a scholarly journal, and the short-term, poorly paid contracts now common at the start of an academic career.

“Universities are increasingly putting time limits on completing PhDs,” Van Bueren says, “which makes it harder for those who have to work while studying.”

Young academics may also be handicapped by not knowing how to write a CV or who to use as a referee. Even the academic style of discourse may be difficult to master. “Academia is very theoretical,” Van Bueren says. “People like me come from backgrounds where people resolved problems with their hands.”

Van Bueren is not alone in raising such issues. One academic wrote that, as a university lecturer, he found it harder to come out about his working-class origins than to come out as gay. Others have reported difficulties in doing the social and professional networking – at international conferences, for example – that is often necessary to become fully established in an academic career.

Van Bueren has observed in the past that, while gender diversity in university faculties has increased, class diversity has, if anything, declined. Feminism and diversity are celebrated, but there is no equivalent celebration of working-class intellectuals.

Van Bueren decided her to become a human rights lawyer at age 11, after reading the inside cover of Babi Yar, a novel based on the massacre of 33,000 Jews in Ukraine in 1941. “I thought I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else,” she says. Her own Jewish family suffered relentless persecution: her maternal grandparents walked from the Lithuanian-Polish border to the English Channel in the early 20th century, while all but one of her Dutch father’s family were murdered in Auschwitz.

So how difficult was it to achieve her ambition? She played truant from school, immersing herself in the local library, because teachers told her that, with her background, she wouldn’t be able to read law. “I thought that if they didn’t believe in me, I would be better off teaching myself,” she says.

Her parents told her that if she had piano lessons, money might not be available to support her through post-compulsory education. Her father opposed her plans to do a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, following her master’s at University College London, and said she should study to become a barrister because that entailed clearer income prospects. She agreed to do so because he was dying of cancer.

She was not brought up in grinding poverty, however. The family earned enough to make a small means-tested contribution to her student maintenance grant and she hardly lacked cultural capital. “There were books in the home,” she says. “My father, though he left school at 14, was well read and bought the Observer.”

When she went to Cardiff University for her first degree, “I loved it, literally from the first day … It was the 1960s. There was a feeling of openness, that anything was possible.”

Shouldn’t we worry more about the paucity of academics who come from families in what is sometimes called the “precariat” or the “underclass” – people on zero-hours contracts, for example, who frequently endure spells on zero income, or families that depend on benefits?

Van Bueren says she doesn’t use terms such as “underclass”, preferring “terminology that encapsulates people’s dignity”. “Working class” apparently does that, though some social scientists would say the term is obsolete.

A former lead commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, she wants to bring class discrimination, alongside discrimination on grounds of race and gender, into equalities legislation.

Don’t we need a more precise definition of working class? “We need to define class, not just working class, in the way other forms of statutory discrimination are defined – through case law. Everybody thinks they know who a child is. But one of the hardest parts of drafting the convention on children’s rights was defining a child. Do you become a man or woman at 12 or 13, as in some communities?

“I want people to feel able to talk freely about their background and not suffer prejudice because of it.”