On 18 February 2016, I wrote a letter to Valerie Amos, Director of SOAS, objecting to the unethical treatment of two Southeast Asian students who had been awarded Alphawood Scholarships. She wrote a letter in return which I felt was worrisome in a number of ways. First, Amos offered no apology to the students. She stated, “Donors to SOAS or any higher education institution are within their rights to stipulate what nature of academic work their gift is intended to support.” Given the unethical actions which had taken place and the lack of apology, the implication is that donors’ rights are more important at SOAS than the rights of students.
Furthermore, Amos claimed that “due to an administrative oversight,” the restriction of funding to art “in antiquity” “was not clearly communicated to scholarship applicants.” In fact, it wasn’t merely unclear, it wasn’t communicated at all: SOAS’s website, pamphlets and social media had not stated any period restrictions and had specifically invited applications for scholarships for modern and contemporary art degrees. In my letters of 18 and 23 February, I therefore asked Amos to confirm that in the latest round of scholarships, for the 2016-’17 intake, there had been no retroactive limitation of funding to “antiquity” in the review of applications. Amos never replied. As emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request later exposed, Scholarships Committee members in fact secretly rigged the review process to reject applicants with modern/contemporary art backgrounds or study plans. See the next blogpost, “May 2016: Rigged Scholarship Awards Revealed through Freedom of Information Act.”
It is noteworthy that Amos in her letter of 19 February ignored the important question of what art “in antiquity” means. The definition of “antiquity” is not at all clear in different Southeast Asian cultures and histories. This is not an idle question, as the sizable Alphawood gift of £15 million will have a lasting impact on the relatively small field of Southeast Asian art.
