The term Anglo-Saxon has been removed from a leading UK university’s course and module titles to reduce the risk of bright and inquiring students being radicalised by what academics describe as latent “nationalist narratives” (GB News, Mail, Telegraph).
The University of Nottingham offers postgraduate courses in Anglo-Saxon history and literature and is the only university in the country to offer a Viking Studies course.
But in a move to decolonise the curriculum, professors at the prestigious Russell Group institution have renamed a masters course in “Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies” as “Viking and Early Medieval English Studies”, while a module within the programme titled “Research Methods in Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies” has had the “Anglo-Saxon” term removed in favour of “Early Medieval English”.
Teaching staff at Nottingham are also now primed to ensure module content aims at “undercutting nationalist narratives” and “essentialist ideas” about nationality – i.e., the belief that English identity is distinct and confers fundamental characteristics.
The term Anglo-Saxon typically refers to a cultural group which emerged and flourished between the fall of Roman Britain, and the Norman conquest, when Germanic peoples – Angles, Saxons, and Jutes – arrived and forged new kingdoms in what would later become a united England. This was also the period of Old English epics such as Beowulf (which, naturally, now comes with a trigger warning at Aberdeen University, thanks to its depictions of “animal cruelty” and a narrative undercurrent of “ableism”).
Nottingham University’s decision follows similar moves in North America, where academics in thrall to the higher education system’s grievance studies sector have been busily campaigning against the term Anglo-Saxon on the basis that it suggests a distinct, native Englishness built around ‘whiteness’, which encourages racism.
Back in 2019, for instance, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the term Anglo-Saxon”.
This was triggered by the resignation from the society of uber woke Canadian academic, Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm.
In a piece co-authored with Dr Erik Wade for the Smithsonian magazine she claimed that the phrase is “ahistorical” – in that it was never used by the, er, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – and, in any case, is “racist”, a “supremacist dog whistle”, and its “association with whiteness has saturated our lexicon to the point that it’s often misused in political discourse and weaponised to promote far-right ideology”.
Perhaps sensing the danger to their careers of any attempt to scrutinise in scholarly fashion this mélange of questionable historiography, political activism and hyperbole, members of ISAS hastily resolved to change its name.
Others were not so pliant, however, with several dozen medieval historians and archaeologists signing a statement defending the use of the term. The signatories to the letter, published on the Forum for Multidisciplinary Anglo-Saxon Studies, said:
“The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere. In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.
“The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.”
Writing for The Critic, Samuel Rubinstein concurred. “Even if the Anglo-Saxons had only seldom referred to themselves as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, they did refer to themselves as ‘Angles’ and as ‘Saxons’,” he said, adding:
“Hence modern-day East Anglia; and hence Sussex and Wessex and Essex and Middlesex. Even if there were no contemporary references to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ then — although, it bears repeating, there were — it would still be fine for historians to speak of the ‘Angles and the Saxons’, and, when wishing to refer to the West Germanic population of early-medieval Britain as a whole, perhaps ‘Anglo-Saxon’ for short.”
These interventions notwithstanding, Cambridge University Press has since decided to rename its “Anglo-Saxon England” academic journal “Early Medieval England and its Neighbours”.
As the historian Dominic Sandbrook put it in a blunt reply to the timorous publishing house on X (formerly Twitter): “Be honest. You changed the title because you are total drips and didn’t have the courage to say no to a handful of mad Americans. And that is about the size of it.”
David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University joined criticism of Cambridge’s capitulation, telling the Telegraph: “The journal should glory in its distinguished reputation rather than trying to reinvent itself under a bland new name dictated by a passing fashion for dropping the term Anglo-Saxon.”
Cambridge University’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) has also since succumbed to woke groupthink, with staff now teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”.
Information provided by ASNC explains its approach to teaching, stating: “Several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.
“In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism – that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity – by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.”
The terms within the Department’s title – “Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic” – haven’t escaped the notice of adminstrators either, and are currently being “addressed” as part of efforts to make teaching more “anti-racist”.
Back in 2022, research by Civitas suggested that institutions heavily engaged in attempts to decolonise curricula may struggle to fulfil their legal free speech duties.
The think tank set out to ascertain whether there is a correlation between the frequency of occurrence of free speech controversies, and the intensity with which a university adopts decolonisation initiatives.
To that end, researchers first identified 374 free speech controversies that occurred at UK universities during the period 2017-20. These included: 142 “anti-free speech petitions”, 123 “transphobic” controversies, 30 so-called “no-platformings” or “disinvitations” of external speakers, and multiple demands for the censure or firing of academics, and/or restrictions on their publication and teaching.
Next, they scoured university websites, looking for any mention of either formal university policies or official statements/commitments on decolonisation or any mention of academics pushing for decolonisation. What they found was that “the decolonisation movement is more pronounced in British universities than previously thought”. Specifically. over half (56%) of UK universities have “an official commitment in some form”, while a third (34%) “employ academics that are advocating for decolonisation”. Seven out of 10 have at least one or the other.
Correlation analysis of these variables then established that free speech controversies do in fact tend to occur more often “where there are official policies/statements as well as academic advocates of decolonisation”.
At an anecdotal level much evidence obviously already exists to suggest that decolonisation initiatives often involve senior administrators, bodies like Advance HE and/or radical activists pressuring academics to conform and overriding their independence when it comes to changing module titles or course names – as at Cambridge and Nottingham – or setting reading lists for their courses and writing their lectures.
What’s important about the quantitative research conducted by Civitas, however, is that it suggests these anecdotes aren’t anecdotes at all, but instances of a wider, statistically observable trend across UK higher education.
