Revealed: Aberdeen’s ‘curriculum decolonising’ plans

The Granite City is an unlikely front in the cultural revolution, but Aberdeen University is about to change that. A document from the institution’s education committee has been passed to me. Titled ‘Decolonising the Curriculum – Timelines and Approval Processes’, it sets out plans to ‘embed a bold, progressive and sustained programme of antiracist curricular reform’.

All courses will be given three years to ‘decolonise’. Academics are required to ‘review their reading lists’ and provide ‘additional perspectives on the course subject’. New courses must explain ‘how the curriculum will address the principle of decolonisation’. This will be ‘a constant process… not a linear project with a definite end’. Meanwhile, the library has already set up a system for reporting ‘problematic language in catalogue records’ and produced ‘a guide to decolonising reading lists’, to be published at the start of the next academic year.

The reason for the purge is Aberdeen’s belief that ‘all British universities, all disciplines taught and researched in them have been historically influenced by Eurocentric colonialism and its cultural concept of race’. So everything will be scrutinised for any suggestion that ‘particular perspectives, values and ideologies’ are ‘universal, superior, dominant, and complete’. This way of thinking, the document says, ‘renders invisible the historical and current role of racialised people’ in ‘the production of knowledge’. At the centre will be ‘students and staff with lived experience and from backgrounds historically affected by colonialism’.

What might this look like? Consider how the ideology is practised in other universities. Keele warns that ‘the emphasis on empirics’ is a ‘Euro-centric thought’ and a ‘pervasive characteristic’ in nursing. Manchester Metropolitan cautions science lecturers against ‘predominantly white, middle-class teaching methods’. Warwick tells academics to engage students on ‘how colonialism, coloniality and race affect the discipline/topics they are studying’.