The Toolshed
As someone who just finished their PhD this new movement in academia to ‘decolonise’ concerns me. Recently, Joanna Williams, education editor at spiked, contributed this to the discussion. You can read the full piece here.
The demand for universities to ‘decolonise’ has become one of the central tenets of the identity-driven student protest movement. It has driven a cleansing of ‘colonial iconography’ in the form of statues, pictures and the names of buildings. It has also turned the spotlight on what is taught in higher education, with the call to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. …
That academics and students in the world’s most elite universities should be so keen to ditch ‘dead white dudes’ in favour of ‘values and skills for diverse cultural environments’ speaks to more than just philistinism. It suggests a self-loathing, a hatred for the values that have built the modern Western world and a desire to replace social and scientific progress (that has produced global benefits) with more modest and relativist goals of respect and recognition.
Today, the word ‘university’ serves as an embarrassing reminder of universality; the Latin and Old French origins of the word suggest ‘entire’, not just in reference to all knowledge, or all members of the academic community, but to knowledge that was universally true and of relevance to all humanity.
In the rush to decolonise education, and rid the syllabus of ‘dead white dudes’, campaigners forget that the insights and advances made by these past intellectual giants have had an impact that goes way beyond the specific category of ‘white men’. It makes no sense to talk about introducing ‘diverse cultural perspectives’ into teaching or the pursuit of knowledge. Scientific principles and mathematical equations, for example, are universal; they are only held to be true if the results hold irrespective of time, place or the person doing the testing.
Although, in the past, the majority of scientists were middle-class white men, the knowledge of the world they uncovered transcends their identity group. That the advances made by the likes of Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Faraday are not culturally specific is evidenced by the number of people around the world who daily board airplanes, drive cars, undergo surgery and use computers.
That knowledge can convey universal truths about humanity, and can speak to more than the narrow identity group of the originator, goes beyond science – it holds for art, music, literature and philosophy, too. This idea of people as equal, with shared experiences, emotions and interests, explains the enduring legacy of works by ‘dead white dudes’ such as Shakespeare, Moliere, Mozart, Beethoven, Picasso and Caravaggio. Such an idea also underpins democracy, citizenship and justice. For this reason, the rejection of a ‘white’ intellectual heritage is anything but radical. Works by Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine and Karl Marx triggered intellectual, social and political upheavals that went to the very heart of contemporary establishment beliefs.
The bizarre rush to decolonise or internationalise education pours scorn on all the major intellectual and social advances of past centuries. Today, works of literature and philosophy are not judged according to their universal relevance, their relationship to truth, or their intellectual worth, but simply on the identity of the author, with those who are most oppressed considered to have greatest insight. Many students have been taught a cheap, ad hominem form of criticism by their lecturers. As such, students’ demands for more black or female writers to be covered on the curriculum have an inevitable logic; their campaigns put into practice what they have picked up in the classroom.
Questioning the content of the curriculum is always a useful exercise, but a philistine rejection of knowledge based on nothing more than the gender or skin colour of the originator drags the university, and society more broadly, backwards. It reinforces an intellectual relativism and prevents any scientific advance, work of literature or musical score being judged as better or more valuable than another.
When academics and students abandon both tradition and universalism, they reject the university. Rather than one ‘community of masters and scholars’, we end up with a multitude of different competing interest groups, all demanding equal recognition and respect. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, we end up trapped in a permanent present. The call to ‘decolonise higher education’ epitomises both these trends.
Joanna Williams is education editor at spiked. Her new book, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge, is published by Palgrave Macmillan UK. (Order this book from Amazon (USA).
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