the education of exploitation

17.09.2026

Why complain? It will impact your career and potential employers (Suffer the injustice).

Never call it out.

Just now, travelling home from visiting my girlfriend, I saw a post by a working class student with a PhD. He was complaining that his supervisors had never told him about the hidden curriculum in a PhD, how to become part of the academia industry. He saw them as irresponsible. He couldn’t get any work, research related or not. He was living on benefits.

And underneath? Someone, probably an academic, had told him to shut up because it might affect his chances of employment.

Shocking. Academics are supposed to tell the truth. Not suppress it. They are supposed to be ethical. Not characterless.

But what I read is not surprising. In my culture, as I am half Sikh, we are taught that it is just as much of a sin to stomach injustice as to be unjust. And here we have this advice from these so-called academics, this advice to be silent and silenced by oppression, discrimination and prejudice. To stomach the injustice. To never attempt to call it out and change it.

What is this evidence of? That education in this country is an education of exploitation. They see working class (and male, ethnic) doctoral students like I was as cash cows and nothing else. To have our cash extracted out of us and then discarded. One could trace this to when they started charging students for fees in this country. One sees it in how they treat foreign students that come here in the hope of having a better life.

I will point out that I did everything that I was supposed to do to become a university professor. I had four degrees including my PhD. I published my doctoral thesis as a book. I went to several postgraduate conferences and presented. I organised a postgraduate conference. I wrote for websites for English Literature, including one run by the university. I taught in after homework clubs, with refugee and migrant adults learning English, in primary schools and secondary schools as a doctoral student. Yet all they wanted from me was free labour and my money. They didn’t want to give back anything in return apart from the piece of paper with the qualification which didn’t amount to anything and could not get me any work.

Because this is the tragedy. They take our hope and monetise it for their own benefit. Without caring for us. Knowing that they are going to crush all of our dreams because we are not like them.

And if you say it? Then it is us that are the villains, not them. It is us that are unjust. Not them. It is us that should be shunned. Not them. It is a system of injustice and exploitation. Because in an education of exploitation, if you do not exploit, then you are not worthy of joining the gang. Yes, they see us as unworthy, rather than them. This is the education of exploitation.

academic racism

06.09.2026

As the recent Arday case has highlighted, racism is structural to Western academia and to academic culture. But I already knew this.

I got six ‘A’ Levels with five As and a B, with the maths exam just 1% below the A grade. I did the most ‘A’ Levels in one go that anyone had ever done at my sixth form while working twenty hours a week at Pizza Hut. I passed my Cambridge interview and they pooled me. But they still didn’t let me in. In my school, the only ones that applied to Oxbridge and didn’t get in were the Indian kids. All of the white boys got in. This was my first experience of racism with Western academia.

When I finished my PhD, I got my doctorate published as a monograph. This is difficult. Not only that, but I got articles into top journals. Completely by myself. I didn’t have anyone that could read the drafts. I didn’t have a support network. I did it completely by myself. And yet, when I applied to university professor roles for two and a half years, I didn’t get one single interview. Not one single one.

No one helped me with any professional opportunities. I spent the time in the PhD presenting at conferences, organising conferences, writing for academic websites that my university was superintending. I volunteered in teaching with adults and schoolchildren. I did everything possible. And yet, because no one would help me or give me any opportunities, I am not a university professor. My university would not let me teach any classes no matter how much I raised the issue. And therefore, I cannot apply to anything because they all ask for higher education experience.

But I do not blame myself. I blame these racists. It surprised me that the supposedly intellectual people in this country were racists. They pay lip service to a meritocracy and to diversity and inclusion. But they are the most racist of all. They will never accept you amongst themselves. They keep the opportunities for those like themselves.

Because this country is what it is, people say to me that it is not racism. It is just a very competitive field. But then I watch people with less academic achievement than myself getting roles. And what is the difference between me and them? That they have the right colour skin and that someone there helped them and gave them a chance. Without someone giving you an opportunity and a chance, helping you on your first steps, you cannot do anything.

And I am resentful. I spent a decade or so of my life becoming a researcher. I worked very hard. I made sacrifices, big sacrifices. I could have got married young. I could have started a family. I could have amassed wealth working. And this is how they treated me.

So when you’re making your little comments about how the woke culture has overtaken academia and that it is not based on talent, this is just a reminder about how this academic structure treats us ethnic minority men. How it shapes our lives. When you’re making your little comments because your white privilege seems threatened, this is the reality of what it is. This voice that is so powerful has had to find channels outside of academia to be heard. That’s how inclusive and great academia is in this Western world.

The Kew Gardens Archive Brought to Life: The SS Great Britain Wardian Cases Exhibition at the RHS Flower Show at Hampton Court

11.07.2024
Dr. Suneel Mehmi

There were many unique characteristics of the RHS Flower Show at Hampton Court which I observed as a novice to the event. The variety of our relationships to plants and flowers in art, culture and food. The friendliness of the people there. The almost overwhelming enthusiasm. One such characteristic was that they had plant porters and also that many of the public that did without the plant porters were struggling with the structures of the plants as they flowed within the spaces. The plant structures – so beautiful to behold and so suitable to evolution and adaptation – seemed particularly unwieldy and cumbersome, and their fragility in transit was worrying. I was particularly surprised that at the very start of the morning, people were buying the plants so that they had to carry them around for the whole event, although I suppose that was so that they could get their first choice.

It was in this context that I came across the SS Great Britain Wardian Cases Exhibition. I had already seen the Wardian case at Kew Gardens for our volunteer training there, so it was not an unfamiliar sight, and I even knew some of the history behind this construction. The Wardian case is what I would describe as a life box that protects plants in a microclimate where they only need to be watered once during a two-month crossing.

Something akin to a miniature Victorian glasshouse, although made out of wood, the Wardian case has been described as a revolution in the long distance transportation of plants. Patently, the construction was where the sciences of botany and biology found their sanctuary and spring as the living plants could be studied in Europe rather than grown from seeds in a foreign land. Again, the case allowed the transportation of economically important plants and is thus one of the most significant relics in the history of modern capitalism and global development. One of the most noteworthy connections with Kew gardens is with the exportation of seedlings from our glasshouses to Ceylon and Malaya in the 1870s to begin the rubber plantations. However, Kew Gardens also habitually used Wardian cases to transport plants until 1962.

The display at the RHS Flower show was a preview of the exhibition at the SS Great Britain which is Bristol’s number one visitor attraction. On the ship’s weather deck, six reconstructed Wardian cases are on display for visitors to explore. Each is a replica of the last surviving ship-board example designs which are to be found in the Kew Gardens archive. Based on research from the Brunel Institute, studies of the ship’s cargo manifests, each case is planted with a true-to-life ‘order’. The cases will celebrate the inbound and outbound plant species that the ship transported across the world between 1859 and 1875. The exhibition highlights the role of steamships in the transportation of plants and the making of the modern world.

Along with the exhibition of the Wardian cases, there is other horticultural interest. There is a botany-themed ‘discovery talk’ and horticultural workshops. A ‘botanist’s cabin’ has also been added to the ship’s museum in which you are to become immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of life onboard – a lived experience and introduction to the important work and research of Victorian botanists and ‘plant hunters’.

The exhibition at the RHS Flower Show was an exciting and stimulating moment in time travel to a monumental period in the history of plants and in the makings of a globalised world. Looking at those fairly small boxes with such a colossal impact was a message that just a little thought and a few materials can change reality. The resourcefulness and ingenuity of the human mind can reshape everything. As we try to combat the mass extinction event that is threatening all plant life and diversity, the Wardian case stands as a symbol that improvement can be wrought to transform botany, biology, the life sciences – and the future. And the Wardian case is also a symbol of connection across the world through transport. The future is about more connection across cultures through science and study enabled through constructions like the Wardian case. And more connections with Kew Gardens, its science and its archives and knowledge to inspire the understanding of this living planet and the foundations on which it has been built.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to the SS Great Britain for allowing me to share the photographs and especially to Emily France there who was so helpful with the research and the permissions.