Oxford’s Oriental name change is a mistake

Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies has had a name change: it will now be known as the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. University bigwigs opted to drop the word ‘oriental’ over fears that it might be too outdated and potentially offensive. This is a small-minded attack on a great and important subject. It’s also a distraction from the university’s real problems.

The word’s presence in the faculty’s name hasn’t stopped Oxford from accepting more students from China, India, and the rest of what we once knew as the ‘Orient’ than ever previously – just as Cecil Rhodes’ statue hasn’t prevented the university from having more black students than ever before. So if this name change is unlikely to do much to increase the university’s welcome diversity, what’s really going on?

Professor David Rechter, the faculty board’s chairman, said that many ‘considered the word ‘oriental’ to be inappropriate’. The new name, he said, better reflects the ‘breadth and diversity of academic activity’. Such a decision – which comes after 18 months of consultation with students and staff – is hardly unprecedented. The University of London’s School of Oriental and African studies changed its name to SOAS in 2013, though not its penchant for hosting a greater number of questionable speakers than any other UK university.

Oxford’s sudden shift reflects the university’s ongoing moral panic over its colonial history. It also shows that the pernicious influence of one of the most tedious but damaging books of the twentieth century – Edward Said’s Orientalism – is alive and well. Since the book’s publication in 1978, the term ‘orientalism’ has permeated through academia. It has become shorthand for referring to a supposed patronising and bigoted tendency within the West towards Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian societies.

According to Said, by viewing these places as lands of Aladdin-style kingdoms of golden splendours and mysterious religions, we Westerners have fabricated a version of the East to be used at the service of the left’s favourite bugbear: imperialism. By doing so, we have created a myth of eastern cultures designed solely to make the West seem more impressive and civilised by comparison.

Far better scholars than me have long since showed up Said’s work as full of holes, inaccuracies, and spurious assertions. But it has still had a revolutionary effect within academia. His belief that almost all Western students of the Middle East (excepting, of course, those who gave him nice reviews) were pawns of imperialism and Zionism has long since become orthodoxy. Unfortunately for Oxford, this myopia erases a long history of reverent scholarship.

Yes, the subject of Oriental Studies itself dates back to 19^th century. Unsurprisingly, during a period of imperial expansion, having a growing number of colonial administrators able to speak Sanskrit, Burmese, and Persian was a going concern. The Oriental Institute opened in 1961, just as decolonisation marked the end of Britain’s time as an imperial power.

But rather than just exist as a finishing school for bureaucrats, the study of eastern cultures and societies has been going on at Oxford from the appointment of the first professor of Hebrew in the 17^th century. The first students of Arabic might have been reading the Koran out of a Christian duty to rebut its heresies. But as the university expanded, it produced generations of fine students of the Oriental world, who treated the subject with appropriate respect, rather than patronising arrogance.

Anthony Eden, for example, graduated with a Double First in Persian and Arabic. He later put that to good use in his attempt to save the Middle East from its own appalling leadership. And a city that produced T. E. Lawrence can hardly be said to not have taken the Orient seriously.

The perception that Oriental Studies is somehow a course wracked by self-loathing, or an irrelevant imperial hangover, is sad. It puts students off studying it at a time when it is more relevant than ever. Tensions in the Middle East have overshadowed my whole life, while the growth of North Africa and the very real threat of 21^st century Chinese imperialism upends the world order. Not since the days when a quarter of the world was imperial pink has studying the East been more urgent.

A report published earlier this year by the Higher Education Policy Institute showed that the number of Chinese Studies students at British universities hasn’t increased in the past 25 years. Meanwhile, the number of departments offering the single-honours undergraduate degree has fallen by a third. At Oxford, the number of undergraduates taking Oriental Studies is 151 – about one per cent of the total number of students. This is perhaps unsurprising, since it is only offered by a quarter of colleges.

So if this new Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies really wants to improve its image, it should focus on improving those numbers. Eighteen months is far too long to spend debating removing a word, when China can build a skyscraper in 19 days.