Zootopia 2 shows academia the way on combating harm

Higher education has signalled significant steps forward in creating belonging, expanding equitable opportunity, and addressing its own historical and structural inequities in recent years. However, these developments have largely materialised as revised statements, limited pilots and ceremonial acts of recognition – gestures that touch the surface of institutional life without shifting the deeper structures that sustain inequity. Yet even these modest advancements have drawn political attack, with efforts at repair recast as dangerous ideology rather than basic responsibility.

Faced with the political cost of visible change and the internal cost of disrupting hierarchies, universities often retreat into abstraction, framing the structural work required to address harm as too “complex” to pursue. This is not about intentional malice, but about how habitual linguistic distance makes harm harder to see and harder still to confront. And as both a participant in university processes and a scholar of how stories can narrate, reveal and obscure, I see a clear pattern: “complexity” diffuses accountability.

Racist and sexist misconduct becomes a “miscommunication” rather than a violation of dignity; staff burnout becomes a “capacity challenge” rather than the predictable outcome of chronic understaffing and overwork. Harm is redescribed into procedural vocabulary – a sleight of hand that deflects accountability and gaslights those forced to absorb the consequences. And once harm is treated as an unfortunate misunderstanding rather than a product of power, institutions lose the capacity to recognise it at all – and instead reproduce the very damage they claim to be dismantling.

Children’s media, however, cannot hide behind such abstraction. It must make harm legible so young audiences understand who is hurt, who chooses, and what it costs. That requirement for clarity becomes its own honesty – allowing the writers to say aloud what higher education, with all its expertise, hesitates to name.

A striking example is offered by Zootopia 2, Disney’s highly successful new buddy cop comedy. In minutes, the film shows how structural harm is enacted and disguised: compliance passes for neutrality, prestige becomes a shield, care slides into surveillance, and history is kept out of sight to stabilise the present. It makes visible what universities often describe away – that gestures of progress can coexist with unchanged power structures, and that truth-telling within such systems carries real cost.

Early in the story, officers obey an order to silence colleagues who threaten to expose corruption. Routine allows obedience to outrun hesitation. Research on institutional betrayal identifies the same dynamic in universities, where policies that disadvantage marginalised groups are defended as “standard practice” and their impact abstracted rather than confronted.

Judy Hopps, the first bunny officer in her predator-led city, is celebrated yet warned that her every action will make life harder for those who follow her – a reminder that representation becomes burden when structures remain unchanged. Universities replicate this dynamic when they reach for gestures – diversity statements, new committees, curated optics – that feel safer than examining how their own practices reproduce the inequities those gestures claim to address. Symbolic progress may create visibility, but without reform, the work and the risk fall entirely on individuals while the structures around them stay intact.

Judy’s dynamic with her partner, Nick, reveals another mechanism: care delivered without trust becomes control. As Sara Ahmed notes, care-language wielding authority under the guise of concern constrains rather than supports. Universities increasingly replicate this through heightened monitoring and pre-emptive oversight, which substitute managerial vigilance for genuine collaboration. What is missing is clarity about when oversight protects and when it merely expands control.

Pawbert, the film’s antagonist, shows how those positioned to change inequitable systems are often those most invested in preserving them. As heir to a legacy that concentrates power, he protects it even as he recognises its harm. Universities mirror this when leaders defend inherited structures rather than redistribute authority.

This is not to argue for a university without leadership – but for leadership that is accountable, porous, and willing to cede power where decisions affect others’ conditions of work and study. It is a call for courageous universities – ones that involve those who live the consequences of exclusion in shaping remedies; design support systems that protect rather than police; confront histories of land, labour and dispossession openly rather than manage them as reputational risk; and reward equity work rather than allowing it to accumulate as invisible, uncompensated labour.

The irony is that higher education is now starting to feel the consequences of its own governance habits. Institutional resilience has been weakened by hierarchical decision chains, risk-averse committees and leadership structures. These patterns leave universities more vulnerable in a political climate where even minimal accountability is cast as provocation.

In the US, oversight is weaponised to discipline even modest equity reforms; in the UK, operational freedom is increasingly conditional. Had institutions cultivated shared power, transparency and trust, they would be harder to intimidate – but the habits built to maintain their comfort have instead made them easier to control.

As Zootopia 2 makes clear, harm stops only when people refuse to look away and act together to interrupt it. Higher education knows this – yet too often waits for safer conditions rather than creating them. Certainly, courage will not be easy in a climate that punishes dissent, but avoidance will only hasten the collapse it hopes to escape.

And if Zootopia 2 has achieved global success despite attacks on Hollywood’s own “woke” commitments, then higher education’s hesitation to confront structural harm cannot be explained by political threat alone. The harder truth is that the sector fears the disruption that clarity would bring: not because such change is unworkable, but because it would require institutions to confront their own reflections.

But we are either accomplice to harm’s repetition or complicit in its undoing; there is no neutrality and no shelter in hesitation. In the end, the crisis is not one of understanding but of courage – and higher education must decide whether it will face the truth or be undone by it.

Éile Rasmussen is a metadisciplinary humanist doing an MA in global cultures at King’s College London.