Doug Stokes

Universities should resist calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’

Meghan Markle has reportedly backed calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. This campaign to promote ethnic minority thinkers in place of ‘male, pale and stale’ academics also has support from the Labour party. Angela Rayner, shadow education secretary, has said that ‘like much of our establishment, our universities are too male, pale and stale and do not represent the communities that they serve or modern Britain’. If Labour comes to power, Rayner promised to use the Office For Students to change things. But this move to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ is in fact a big mistake. Firstly, the campaign conjures up images of dusty old men engaged in an unconscious conspiracy to ensure ‘non-western’ worldviews are stamped out. The implications is that those from an ethnic minority and women are locked out of the academy. In reality, social science and humanities departments are nearly all progressive and left-wing. From Edward Said’s post-colonial critique of Western Orientalism, Marxist critiques of global imperialism, through to the postmodern deconstructions of ‘Western hegemony’ by the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Western social science and humanities are full of alternative viewpoints. The more telling challenge would be to find a university offering any course, anywhere, that celebrates the achievements of Western civilisation. For many academics, all evils seemingly flow from the West. Secondly, the movement to ‘decolonise’ the university is highly selective in its cherry picking of facts and targets. The target of the campaign is the original sin of Western imperialism and the horrors of transatlantic slavery. But this focus on the bad ignores the West’s role in bringing this barbaric trade to an end. In its reading of history, the Royal Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of male and pale soldiers in the US’s civil war to end American slavery, or the continuity of non-Western slavery today – India is now ranked as having over 18 million souls in bondage – are overlooked or largely ignored.

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