Recolonising the curriculum

 

 

‘I’m tired of reading about dead white men’

Have you heard this before? If you haven’t, you probably don’t work in the Arts & Humanities faculty of an Anglo-American university. And, having read these words, you identify them as the disgruntled moans of long-haired teenagers, not the serious opinions of tenured professors and campus administrators. 

You aren’t entirely wrong – the latter prefer the phrase ‘decolonise higher education’, which sounds fancier. Universities are presently rolling out sweeping reforms ostensibly designed to promote ‘diversity & inclusion’, and recurringly present these initiatives as acts of ‘decolonisation’. As a finishing philosophy PhD student and teacher at a large UK university, I regularly receive emails announcing conferences, workshops and Zoom meetings about how to go about decolonising academia, the humanities, research, and yes, the curriculum. 

The frustratingly vague and verbose explanations often given for these projects by their advocates can make it tricky to pin down what these slogans mean, exactly. However, the following resource – a Decolonisation ‘Learning and Teaching Toolkit’ provided by SOAS (London) – is widely shared and relatively concise. You may recall that SOAS made the headlines a few years ago, when its student union called for Plato and Kant to be removed from the philosophy curriculum. Let us therefore come to this epicentre of decolonisation, and see what we can learn from it. 

According to the Toolkit, the ultimate aims of decolonising the curriculum consist in “transformation through higher education”. The object of ‘transformation’ is, unsurprisingly, “society”, which is plagued by “structural oppression” and “racialised disadvantage”. The text raises ethnic differences in attainment and admissions, as well as reported feelings of “exclusion”, as evidence of the latter. Higher education, we are told, is “necessarily political”, and thus can either be oppressive or liberatory. 

How are these aims to be achieved? By removing the following obstacles to ‘liberation’: 

 1. “the content of syllabi employing concepts, ideas and perspectives that centre or normalise constructions of ‘Westernness’ or ‘whiteness’’ as basic reference points for human society” 

 2. “a very significant presence for scholars racialised as white, gendered as male and located, often by virtue of class privileges, within a limited range of Western institutions or canons” 

Translated from progressivese, this essentially amounts to the claim that humanities curricula are unduly Eurocentric, since they largely focus on historically Western or European authors, texts and ideas. To ‘decolonise’ them, then, is to change their contents accordingly, thereby 'diversifying' the perspectives taught to students.

This raises obvious questions, such as those posed by Oxford Theology Professor Nigel Biggar in this excellent piece. We may, for instance, ask what is so objectionable about a European university teaching primarily European history and philosophy (or shall we condemn Indian divinity departments for emphasizing Hinduism?). And isn’t it absurdly patronising to suppose that non-white students will be psychologically damaged by reading Plato and Shakespeare, or that they will perform better if they study authors who share their ethnic origins? 

However, I would like to draw attention to an oft-overlooked feature of this supposedly decolonial enterprise : it is, in fact, a colonial enterprise. As such, it is inherently fraudulent. 

This becomes manifest when one examines the specific recommendations and ‘case studies’ offered by the Toolkit. For example, Dr Manjeet Ramgotra details how she successfully ‘decolonised’ a module entitled ‘Introduction to Political Theory’. The module, she tells us, mainly covered Ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Anglo-American thinkers, and gave a “particular [read ‘Eurocentric’] understanding of history and of the development of ideas and politics over time”. The solution? Begin the module by inviting students to “problematise” classical thinkers – that is, to think about ways in which their ideas might contribute to various forms of social oppression. Or, in Dr Ramgotra’s terms, to critically “consider how knowledge and power are constructed through the lens of Plato” and other classical philosophers. Significantly, “feminist” and “postcolonial” perspectives are not simply “added at the end” but rather “integrated” throughout the course. 

We were assured that ‘decolonising the curriculum’ meant challenging dominant Western political and philosophical narratives and exploring alternatives. This is obviously not what is going on here. To the contrary, students are being taught to read historical texts in a very particular way, which those familiar with postmodernism will instantly recognise. The point is not to read texts and draw out their intended meaning, before rationally assessing the arguments and ideas put forward. The question isn’t, ‘is this a good argument for X ?’ or ‘is X true ?’ but rather ‘how does this text help to perpetuate systems of racist or sexist oppression?’. 

Notice that while the transformed curriculum insists on critiquing “classical constructions of political order, citizenship, race, gender, power, voice, oppression and silencing” (emphasis mine) through ‘non-classical’ intellectual traditions like postcolonialism and critical race theory, both of which derive from postmodernism, there is no suggestion that the latter ought to be critiqued as well. For instance, students are encouraged to draw on critical race theorists Charles Mills and bell hooks (sic) to criticise the Western intellectual canon, but never the other way around. In short, the postmodern world-view is presented as an immovable cornerstone of inquiry, the standard by which all philosophy is to be judged.

Postmodernism, which takes all aspects of human life, including knowledge and philosophy, as manifestations of a perennial power-struggle between identity-groups (races, nations, genders, classes) grew out of the deep distrust of authority and tradition that fuelled the European Enlightenment. In this sense (and despite the name), postmodernists are quintessentially modern and indeed Western in their thinking. It is hard not to see the distinctively Western individualism and future-orientation in strident calls for the revolutionary destruction of all ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ deemed insufficiently progressive. Paradoxically, throwing ‘dead white men’ under the bus is a very ‘white’ thing to do. 

Letting ancient texts speak for themselves could constitute a powerful challenge to modern dominant cultural assumptions. Ancient Greek, Indian and Christian thinkers understood that true liberty consists in being freed from the tyranny of desire and the illusions of the senses, which impede the soul in its journey towards the Good, not in 'being yourself' or doing what you want. Our rabidly sensual and entitled modern cultures could learn from this.

But the self-proclaimed decolonisers have no interest in any of that. They would rather evaluate their intellectual forbears with the yard-stick of their own ideological concerns and presuppositions, and have all university students do the same. There is nothing remotely decolonial about this – European imperialists likewise strove to critique and ultimately dismantle traditional value-systems, deemed barbaric and antithetical to ‘progress’. Today’s neo-progressives are merely replacing one dominant Western narrative with another. This is a form of ideological colonisation. 

Leaving aside the totalitarian undertones of the claim that higher education is “necessarily political” and should thereby submit to the demands of a grand political project, lobbyists for ‘decolonisation’ in the academy either lack self-awareness, or are being seriously dishonest to their audiences. We should call them out for it. 

If you’re convinced that your way of thinking is so pure and self-evidently superior that it ought to be fed to all students in all fields of study, you should at least be honest about what you are trying to accomplish.