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’. ‘The course covered the French revolution (which may not be a very interesting topic for African students),’ its toolkit notes at one point.
Aberdeen’s internal briefing says that its efforts are being made as part of its ‘decision to apply for the Race Equality Charter award’. The REC’s stamp of approval requires a university to sign up to statements such as: ‘Racism is an everyday facet of UK society and racial inequalities manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours.’ Efforts to decolonise are also driven by ‘the need to address the degree awarding gap for our Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students’. In short, Aberdeen has been captured by the dismal intellectual progeny of critical race theory.
The document makes no mention of the impact on academic freedom. Lecturers who value their autonomy may well be troubled by the prescriptive nature of these new demands. Even those who agree with the decolonising might pause to ponder the effect on their already burdensome workloads. Overthrowing liberal universalism is jolly revolutionary, but probably doesn’t leave much time for marking essays.
It seems almost churlish to ask how this exciting plan will improve the quality of teaching or research. The proposals don’t appear terribly exercised about educational outcomes beyond their grisly interest in attainment by students of specific ethnic backgrounds. The implication of a supposed ‘awarding gap’ is that performance is (or should be) connected to skin colour. That’s why it is important to distinguish ‘anti-racism’ from commonly understood opposition to racial hatred and discrimination. In ‘antiracism’, the first four letters are silent.
I put some of these questions to the university. A spokesperson said it was joining ‘sector-wide efforts’ to ‘embed an antiracist culture’. But why, in 2023, does Aberdeen feel the need to embed an antiracist culture? What kind of culture is it saying it has now?
In reality, its proposals are critical race theory worn as radical chic, a reflection of how identity, victimhood and crank postmodernism dominate the progressive worldview. Decolonising the curriculum is not about challenging implicit or overlooked racism. The only intersectionality at work is between university marketing departments and faddish cultural politics. Placing undue emphasis on race while abandoning empiricism is poisonous to pedagogy. The outcome will be anything but progressive.
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