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.