Only a fifth of UK universities say they are 'decolonising' curriculum

[downer]

If we think that curriculum is important, then it's worth thinking about how to make it better. That involves discussion. Of course people have egos and they want to get credit, but that doesn't mean the project is worthless.

As faculty, rather than as private individuals, what other efforts can we make to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past? There's research and writing of course, and that may have some long term effects. But as teachers, maybe there's not much else to do apart from made some changes to the curriculum.

[marshwiggle]

If we think that curriculum is important, then it's worth thinking about how to make it better. That involves discussion. Of course people have egos and they want to get credit, but that doesn't mean the project is worthless.

As faculty, rather than as private individuals, what other efforts can we make to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past? There's research and writing of course, and that may have some long term effects. But as teachers, maybe there's not much else to do apart from made some changes to the curriculum.

One thing which would be much more useful is to point out how human beings consistently fail to uphold the ideals they have, and how we are all flawed. So even the "heroes" of today, and the noble sentiments we have now will be looked at askance by our descendants.
So, for instance, looking at the American constitution, and the idea that "all men are created equal", it's reasonable to point out that there was a noble ideal behind that, and eventually people realized that it should include women, non-white people, etc.
AT THE TIME it was written, IN THE CONTEXT of monarchies and aristocracies all over the world, it was a big step forward. The fact that some of the framers owned slaves indicates that they were flawed human beings, but the insight they had enabled LATER generations to EXPAND the ideas.

(And on the other hand, remember that the slaves in the North Atlantic slave trade were captured and sold by OTHER Africans. Every culture has its atrocities and blind spots.)

[downer]

If we think that curriculum is important, then it's worth thinking about how to make it better. That involves discussion. Of course people have egos and they want to get credit, but that doesn't mean the project is worthless.

As faculty, rather than as private individuals, what other efforts can we make to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past? There's research and writing of course, and that may have some long term effects. But as teachers, maybe there's not much else to do apart from made some changes to the curriculum.

One thing which would be much more useful is to point out how human beings consistently fail to uphold the ideals they have, and how we are all flawed. So even the "heroes" of today, and the noble sentiments we have now will be looked at askance by our descendants.
So, for instance, looking at the American constitution, and the idea that "all men are created equal", it's reasonable to point out that there was a noble ideal behind that, and eventually people realized that it should include women, non-white people, etc.
AT THE TIME it was written, IN THE CONTEXT of monarchies and aristocracies all over the world, it was a big step forward. The fact that some of the framers owned slaves indicates that they were flawed human beings, but the insight they had enabled LATER generations to EXPAND the ideas.

(And on the other hand, remember that the slaves in the North Atlantic slave trade were captured and sold by OTHER Africans. Every culture has its atrocities and blind spots.)

That seems like a starting point for a point of view in assessing the past actions of people. It might be part of a debate on whether, for example, we should erect statues of those people, or keep the old ones.

I'm not so clear on what that would accomplish in terms of what I asked - the goal to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past.

[marshwiggle]

If we think that curriculum is important, then it's worth thinking about how to make it better. That involves discussion. Of course people have egos and they want to get credit, but that doesn't mean the project is worthless.

As faculty, rather than as private individuals, what other efforts can we make to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past? There's research and writing of course, and that may have some long term effects. But as teachers, maybe there's not much else to do apart from made some changes to the curriculum.

One thing which would be much more useful is to point out how human beings consistently fail to uphold the ideals they have, and how we are all flawed. So even the "heroes" of today, and the noble sentiments we have now will be looked at askance by our descendants.
So, for instance, looking at the American constitution, and the idea that "all men are created equal", it's reasonable to point out that there was a noble ideal behind that, and eventually people realized that it should include women, non-white people, etc.
AT THE TIME it was written, IN THE CONTEXT of monarchies and aristocracies all over the world, it was a big step forward. The fact that some of the framers owned slaves indicates that they were flawed human beings, but the insight they had enabled LATER generations to EXPAND the ideas.

(And on the other hand, remember that the slaves in the North Atlantic slave trade were captured and sold by OTHER Africans. Every culture has its atrocities and blind spots.)

That seems like a starting point for a point of view in assessing the past actions of people. It might be part of a debate on whether, for example, we should erect statues of those people, or keep the old ones.

I'm not so clear on what that would accomplish in terms of what I asked - the goal to achieve a more equal society that is not scarred by our colonial past.

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human.  Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

What is much more important than casting blame is humility; the realization that good intentions can still lead to awful outcomes, and some of our most well-intentioned actions will have consequences which will be judged by posterity to be horrible.

[downer]

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human.  Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

What is much more important than casting blame is humility; the realization that good intentions can still lead to awful outcomes, and some of our most well-intentioned actions will have consequences which will be judged by posterity to be horrible.

So if your answer is a reply to my question, then you are saying that the best way to promote equality is by teaching humility and not blaming the slaveowners?

[marshwiggle]

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human.  Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

What is much more important than casting blame is humility; the realization that good intentions can still lead to awful outcomes, and some of our most well-intentioned actions will have consequences which will be judged by posterity to be horrible.

So if your answer is a reply to my question, then you are saying that the best way to promote equality is by teaching humility and not blaming the slaveowners?

How about everyone pull out their iPhones, and then Google Foxcon. Look at the tags on all of our clothes for where they're made, and so on. THOSE WHITE PEOPLE who owned slaves were not as much different from ALL of us as we would like to think. Bothered about climate change? How about turn off your air conditioning AND give up your Internet and cell phones. (There's a MASSIVE amount of infrastructure needed to support the lifestyle we take for granted. Look up the environmental harm related to the rare earth materials in smartphones as a very simple example.)

[Parasaurolophus]

Adding more non-white authors to a reading list? Sure that's great.

But calling it "decolonisation" is ridiculous. A white prof telling white students to read Chinua Achebe isn't decolonising anything.

I'm not very worried about what it's called, just as I'm not very worried about whether it's tactically wise to loudly call yourself a democratic socialist. Wringing my hands about that sort of thing just seems like a convenient excuse, rather than a substantive issue.

But it's worth emphasizing that (1) this isn't an organized movement with a few clear goals (which, of course, makes it harder to effect change), and (2) I don't think anyone thinks diversifying reading lists is sufficient on its own. To my mind, (2) is especially important. Just adding Chinua Echebe isn't going to do much of anything; but if you do the usual lit thing of contextualizing his work, of teaching students about the history and politics in which his work is embedded, that seems to me like a valuable contribution worthy of the name 'decolonization'.

Similarly, teaching students about Indigenous history; about their forced assimilation through residential schools (what you guys more commonly call 'Indian boarding schools' or 'Indian day schools') and how that differs from anti-Black racism in America; if you teach them about land claims and the history of Indigenous-government relations with respect to resource development (including, e.g., engineered famines to force Indigenous people off land they occupy so that it could legally be claimed for settlement); or even just teaching them about Indigenous conceptions of their cultural context, or the idea in some Indigenous cultures that stories--and other cultural artifacts--are family, rather than public, property... those are the kinds of things they're not likely to learn about it much detail elsewhere, and it seems to me that would constitute more than just a token nod towards decolonization.

Talk is cheap. And that's what virtue signalling is. (Even a protest is basically virtue signalling.) Remember Kony2012?

Slacktivism is the religion of the 21st century. If you supposedly care about homeless people, volunteer in a shelter, don't go in some stupid march.

To paraphrase an old expression, "virtue is what you display when no-one else is watching."

[...]

If you want to know whether soemone is a racist, forget about whther they wear a BLM t-shirt; talk to their neighbours, colleagues, students, etc. and see how they treat actual people.
What they advertise is inconsequential.

There are many different ways to contribute to change, and protest absolutely has its place. What we've seen a number of times, including in recent history, is that protest, when large enough, can effect real change--it can even topple a government. You can look to the civil rights era in the US, of course, or the gay rights movement; closer to home, you could consider the Indigenous uprising in response to the treatment of the Wet'suwet'en just before coronavirus hit (or, indeed, the similar uprising at Oka in 1990), the student protests in Québec in 2012 (or the series of similar protests with the same goals in prior decades), or the protests against the second Gulf war in 2002. Protest is inconvenient, and it doesn't always work, but it's one perfectly legitimate tool for communicating widespread dissatisfaction with governance.

I would also point out that quite a lot of the people at any protest, but especially in the current protests in the US, really are doing something about it other than protesting in their ordinary lives. It's not like everyone has to choose between, say, community activism and protest. You can do multiple things at the same time, and doing one doesn't preclude the other.

EDIT: I forgot to add, with respect to the last quoted statement, that it seems to me that that's one of the least important, interesting, or informative questions we could ask about someone. Who's going around trying to determine whether people are racist? Nobody I know.

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human. 

They're not necessarily tied to that colonial past, nor are they necessarily tied to the Enlightenment or to Christianity. The principles of human equality, and all the rest, predate both those things, and they've cropped up a number of times in different parts of the world. The focus on the Enlightenment and Christianity as the source of these values (and the attendant mantra of "Judeo-Christian values" or "Athens and Jerusalem") is itself part of the same narrow-minded and historically-blinkered problem that proponents of this kind of curriculum reform are worried about.

Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

This smacks of a straw man to me. At the very least, it's incredibly uncharitable, especially in the context of a discussion taking place on a forum for academics, where you can reasonably expect the discourse to be at a higher level than the local pub. 

How about everyone pull out their iPhones, and then Google Foxcon. Look at the tags on all of our clothes for where they're made, and so on. THOSE WHITE PEOPLE who owned slaves were not as much different from ALL of us as we would like to think. Bothered about climate change? How about turn off your air conditioning AND give up your Internet and cell phones. (There's a MASSIVE amount of infrastructure needed to support the lifestyle we take for granted. Look up the environmental harm related to the rare earth materials in smartphones as a very simple example.)

I don't understand. Wouldn't all that just be "virtue-signalling", according to what you said upthread?

More broadly: the fact that there are serious problems in the world around us shouldn't prevent us from reckoning with our past, especially when the negative legacy of that past is still on prominent display today. Learning about Foxconn is important, and working to stop that kind of exploitation seems like an important goal. Similarly, learning about our own individual contributions to climate change, and learning how to scale them back, is important and laudable too, although even if every individual did so it still would not suffice to address the problem at this point. But none of that makes it any less useful or important for us to reckon with the past and its legacies. And to suggest it should is really just a red herring; it's classic what-aboutism, and looks more like an excuse for inaction than anything else.

[downer]

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human.  Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

What is much more important than casting blame is humility; the realization that good intentions can still lead to awful outcomes, and some of our most well-intentioned actions will have consequences which will be judged by posterity to be horrible.

So if your answer is a reply to my question, then you are saying that the best way to promote equality is by teaching humility and not blaming the slaveowners?

How about everyone pull out their iPhones, and then Google Foxcon. Look at the tags on all of our clothes for where they're made, and so on. THOSE WHITE PEOPLE who owned slaves were not as much different from ALL of us as we would like to think. Bothered about climate change? How about turn off your air conditioning AND give up your Internet and cell phones. (There's a MASSIVE amount of infrastructure needed to support the lifestyle we take for granted. Look up the environmental harm related to the rare earth materials in smartphones as a very simple example.)

I thought it was a yes or no question.

Maybe you are saying that we should not aim to promote equality though our teaching?

[marshwiggle]

Similarly, teaching students about Indigenous history; about their forced assimilation through residential schools (what you guys more commonly call 'Indian boarding schools' or 'Indian day schools') and how that differs from anti-Black racism in America; if you teach them about land claims and the history of Indigenous-government relations with respect to resource development (including, e.g., engineered famines to force Indigenous people off land they occupy so that it could legally be claimed for settlement); or even just teaching them about Indigenous conceptions of their cultural context, or the idea in some Indigenous cultures that stories--and other cultural artifacts--are family, rather than public, property... those are the kinds of things they're not likely to learn about it much detail elsewhere, and it seems to me that would constitute more than just a token nod towards decolonization.

I'm not sure who "you guys" are, but I refer to the schools as "residential schools", since that's the term people recognize. Since I have relatives from India, I don't use "Indian" to refer to North American indigenous people. "First Nations" I think is mostly a Canadian term, so "Indigenous people" seems to be fairly universal and respectful on here.

And were there any elements of Indigenous concepts that modern people would find problematic?  If they don't get mentioned then that sounds kind of like a "token nod towards" diversity. (Indigenous groups had war before the Europeans came along. The Europeans cranked that up for their own ends.)

There are many different ways to contribute to change, and protest absolutely has its place.

If we're talking about peaceful protest, I totally agree. But when a white protester smashes a window, loots and torches a store owned by a black person, I have trouble seeing how that brings justice for the black community.

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human. 

They're not necessarily tied to that colonial past, nor are they necessarily tied to the Enlightenment or to Christianity. The principles of human equality, and all the rest, predate both those things, and they've cropped up a number of times in different parts of the world. The focus on the Enlightenment and Christianity as the source of these values (and the attendant mantra of "Judeo-Christian values" or "Athens and Jerusalem") is itself part of the same narrow-minded and historically-blinkered problem that proponents of this kind of curriculum reform are worried about.

My original point is that many of the problems stem, not from an absence of good intentions, but from a failure to live up to those intentions and/or see how they should be more broadly applied.

How about everyone pull out their iPhones, and then Google Foxcon. Look at the tags on all of our clothes for where they're made, and so on. THOSE WHITE PEOPLE who owned slaves were not as much different from ALL of us as we would like to think. Bothered about climate change? How about turn off your air conditioning AND give up your Internet and cell phones. (There's a MASSIVE amount of infrastructure needed to support the lifestyle we take for granted. Look up the environmental harm related to the rare earth materials in smartphones as a very simple example.)

I don't understand. Wouldn't all that just be "virtue-signalling", according to what you said upthread?

Easy test for virtue signalling: If its value depends on other people seeing you do it, then it's virtue signalling.

More broadly: the fact that there are serious problems in the world around us shouldn't prevent us from reckoning with our past, especially when the negative legacy of that past is still on prominent display today. Learning about Foxconn is important, and working to stop that kind of exploitation seems like an important goal. Similarly, learning about our own individual contributions to climate change, and learning how to scale them back, is important and laudable too, although even if every individual did so it still would not suffice to address the problem at this point. But none of that makes it any less useful or important for us to reckon with the past and its legacies. And to suggest it should is really just a red herring; it's classic what-aboutism, and looks more like an excuse for inaction than anything else.

Climate change is the perfect example of what I'm trying to say. No-one set out to destroy the planet; all of the environmental degradation is because of unintended consequences. Blaming all of the problems resulting from colonialism on essentially genocidal maniacs makes it easy to think that this generation won't make egregious mistakes with horrific consequences. But hindsight is always 20-20.

In pre-partition India, and Yugoslavia, there were ethnic and religious communities who lived in relative harmony for generations until the religious and/or ethnic divisions got whipped up, at which point they began slaughtering one another.

There are countless historical examples of that. Demonizing specific groups never ends well.
On the other hand, being reminded how unintended consequences may bring about the opposite of what we want may help us be a bit more careful and humble in our actions.

[Wahoo Redux]

One thing which would be much more useful is to point out how human beings consistently fail to uphold the ideals they have, and how we are all flawed. So even the "heroes" of today, and the noble sentiments we have now will be looked at askance by our descendants.

The very principles of human equality come out of that "colonial past"; i.e. values of the Enlightenment and Christianity. Society is scarred by human nature; the evils of colonialism are human.  Every human society has problems, and to pretend that "colonialism" is the sole source of the problems, and if somehow we could "erase" that past, everything would be fine, is ridiculous and dangerous.

What is much more important than casting blame is humility; the realization that good intentions can still lead to awful outcomes, and some of our most well-intentioned actions will have consequences which will be judged by posterity to be horrible.

Y'know Marshy, one of the things we try to teach freshman writers is to avoid the obvious blanket statements ("human beings are flawed and sometimes good intentions go bad") because, hey, we already know these things---there's no point in pointing that out.  And we try to teach them not to think in simplistic, diametric terms ("the principles of equality come out of a colonial past")----it's a wee bit more complicated than that.

Rather, focus narrowly and with references.  For instance: Do the statues of slave owners serve the best interests of our current world?  Could we change what we teach to represent broader ideas that include the slaves as well as the slave-owning class so we can look back on the good and the evil in our past?

Have you ever taken comp 101?  (That's rhetorical, BTW.  No need to answer.)

[marshwiggle]

There are many different ways to contribute to change, and protest absolutely has its place. What we've seen a number of times, including in recent history, is that protest, when large enough, can effect real change--it can even topple a government. You can look to the civil rights era in the US, of course, or the gay rights movement; closer to home, you could consider the Indigenous uprising in response to the treatment of the Wet'suwet'en just before coronavirus hit

I must concede this is definitely a vestige of colonialism. Agreement was reached with the elected leaders of all of the Wet'suwet'en groups affected by the piepline, but the hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en objected. It is undeniable that the colonial powers have rejected the authority of their own hereditary rulers in favour of the decisions of elected leaders, so we can't escape the blame on that one.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'm not sure who "you guys" are, but I refer to the schools as "residential schools", since that's the term people recognize.

'You guys' = Americans. I was addressing bacardiandlime, who I think is American (and my apologies if I've traduced you, bacardiandlime!). I've heard residential schools called all kinds of things in the US, and have been asked about the term 'residential school' by a number of American colleagues unfamiliar with the term (but familiar with whatever the local term was). I just wanted to be clear.

And were there any elements of Indigenous concepts that modern people would find problematic?  If they don't get mentioned then that sounds kind of like a "token nod towards" diversity. (Indigenous groups had war before the Europeans came along. The Europeans cranked that up for their own ends.)

Oh, I'm sure, including the status of women and the practice of slavery. I don't know enough about such things to talk about them in any detail, however. One thing I do know a little about is the myth of the ecological Indigenous person, which piggybacks on some decidedly racist 19th-century interpretations of Darwin and glorifications of 'primitivism', but which was embraced and promulgated by a number of Indigenous groups in a failed political gambit to assert title to their lands and win sympathy for the cause. Like all myths, there's a kernel of truth in there, but it's been seriously distorted, and the distortions persist to this day.

Climate change is the perfect example of what I'm trying to say. No-one set out to destroy the planet; all of the environmental degradation is because of unintended consequences. Blaming all of the problems resulting from colonialism on essentially genocidal maniacs makes it easy to think that this generation won't make egregious mistakes with horrific consequences. But hindsight is always 20-20.

Well, a fair bit of that degradation is deliberate and in spite of full knowledge of the consequences (just look at the treasure trove of recent documents which show not just that Exxon and other oil majors knew about climate change and their role in it in the 1970s, but that they deliberately and explicitly worked to undermine public belief in climate change). Likewise, consider the engineered famines of John A. Macdonald, which cleared southern Saskatchewan and Alberta for the CP railway's construction, or engineered famines and forced migrations in the US, for the purpose of legally claiming reserve land by making it 'uninhabited'.

Bad intentions certainly aren't necessary. But they're sufficient, and they are sometimes there to be seen.

I must concede this is definitely a vestige of colonialism. Agreement was reached with the elected leaders of all of the Wet'suwet'en groups affected by the piepline, but the hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en objected. It is undeniable that the colonial powers have rejected the authority of their own hereditary rulers in favour of the decisions of elected leaders, so we can't escape the blame on that one.

Let's not forget that the Supreme Court granted heriditary chiefs jurisdiction over unceded land, too. I mean... really, it seems like the problem lies with the structure of the Indian Act. It was an improvement over a bad situation, sure, but it's still not a very good document. That should have been obvious just from the discriminatory way it outlines 'status' and its transmission, whose predictable result was the erasure of entire generations (part of what is aptly called cultural genocide).

[marshwiggle]

I mean... really, it seems like the problem lies with the structure of the Indian Act. It was an improvement over a bad situation, sure, but it's still not a very good document. That should have been obvious just from the discriminatory way it outlines 'status' and its transmission, whose predictable result was the erasure of entire generations (part of what is aptly called cultural genocide).

Legislation (including the Indian Act) is stuck with trying to square the circle of Indigenous people being both "Canadian" and "Indigenous". The transmission of status issues (such as women who marry non-Indigenous men losing it in the past) reflected what was probably the norm at one time; i.e. that women were more likley to leave the reserves and live like non-Indigenous Canadians than Indigenous men who married non-Indigenous women.

Taxation is one of those problematic issues as well. Centuries ago, the idea that Indigenous people could freely carry their goods and trade without taxes made sense in the context of a more-or-less subsistence lifestyle, where people were basically supporting their own families. However, the situations now with reserves on both sides of the border, with big businesses in things like tobacco, create a situation completely different than what was originally envisioned.

Land on reserves being collectively owned rather than privately owned is another thing that is a reflection of that same previous era. As Indigenous people choose lifestyles more like non-Indigenous people, more of the legislation relating to Indigenous people seems out-of-place, but will be hard to change unless and until Indigenous people can come to a consensus.