History lecturers at the University of Liverpool are being urged to “problematise” whiteness and heterosexuality in their teaching – the prestigious Russell Group institution’s new ‘diversity’ guidance also proposes compulsory inclusivity training for academic staff, to ensure seminars on these topics become “safe spaces” wherein students can retreat from ideas the guidance presupposes they may find offensive (Express, GB News, Telegraph).
The report, entitled History Curriculum Diversity Audit, provides staff with ‘advice’ on how to “diversify” and “decolonise” the history curriculum, bringing questions of race and gender into the topics they teach. Examples of how they might do so are then given, with the report challenging historians to consider: “Can a module that teaches exclusively about race relations do more to problematise and de-centre whiteness?”
The ‘diversity audit’ also notes that there is a lack of “queer history” in teachings on gender, while pointing out that there are no seminars “problematising heteronormativity” – a term drawn from the world of Critical Social Justice activism, and intended to suggest that western society’s bigoted insistence on treating heterosexuality as ‘the norm’ creates an invisible power system that relentlessly brutalises asexual, gay, bisexual, pansexual and other people with non-heterosexual sexual identities.
Elsewhere, the report tells history lecturers that it is not enough to simply include more BAME – meaning Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic – women or non-binary scholars on their reading lists. They are directed that in addition they must discuss the diversity of the reading lists with their students on every module that is taught.
Teaching staff are further told that it is “essential” they make their seminars “safe spaces” because topics such as race and gender can be both “emotional” and “challenging” for students.
Meanwhile, department heads are urged to introduce compulsory training on “inclusive teaching” for all academics to help them “feel more comfortable initiating and managing such conversations”.
However, one lecturer teaching at Liverpool University, who asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions, said of the advice: “It’s all ideologically driven, namely Empire is bad. But it’s the wrong way to approach history.
“Historians should have the freedom to teach what they believe is true rather than having an agreed ideology that you’re not supposed to question.
Dr Edward Skidelsky, a philosophy academic at Exeter University and co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom, agreed: “It’s not the business of universities or university departments to tell lecturers to ‘problematise heteronormativity’ or to ‘de-centre whiteness’, whatever that means.
“University departments should be free to make strategic decisions about teaching and assessment, but they should not impose controversial ideological positions on their members.”
Liverpool’s ‘diversity audit’ comes amid a growing move among higher education providers, sector-specific charities and regulatory bodies, to ‘decolonise’ university-level research and teaching.
In 2022, for the first time, the university watchdog the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) introduced advice on decolonising courses. The independent charity’s so-called “subject benchmark statements” describe the nature of study and the academic standards expected of graduates across a total of 25 subject areas and are intended as “reference points in the design, delivery and review of academic programmes” (QAA). The most recent update to these benchmarks told higher education providers to teach about “colonialism”, “white supremacy” and “class division”.
The Telegraph previously reported that of the 23 universities signed up to sector-specific charity Advance HE’s ‘Race Equality Charter’, 20 of them explicitly say they are “decolonising” courses, while the remaining three have pledged to “liberate”, “diversify” or introduce “compulsory race equality” to their syllabuses.
Last week it also emerged that a new toolkit for ‘decolonising’ philosophy curricula produced by Soas (formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London tells academics that canonical western philosophers from Plato through to Wittenstein did little more than engage in solipsistic “armchair theorising”, and must therefore now make way for more exciting and sophisticated voices from the ‘Global South’. The report, entitled Decolonising Philosophy: a toolkit, even gets into granular detail about module design, lecture titles and content, and which texts should be included on module reading lists.
A recent report for the think tank CIEO by Dr Jim Butcher highlights how initiatives of this kind risk undermining the traditional liberal understanding of ‘academic freedom’ as an individual right.
Inherent within the ‘decolonisation’ agenda now advocated by the QAA, Advance HE, the University of Liverpool (and so on), is an understanding of the locus of academic freedom as not the individual academic, but the university per se.
On this view, research and teaching becomes a collective responsibility subject to regulation, institutional approval/disapproval and sanction by various institutionally approved bodies, like subject groups, senior managers, and – as in Liverpool’s case – equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) teams, all with their pre-determined views of what is and is not ‘progressive’ and therefore what is and is not worthy of academic study.
As Dr Butcher points out, one of the many risks posed by this understanding of academic freedom is that individual academics may lose the confidence to question received wisdom openly and without a sense that they may be contravening the limits of what is deemed acceptable by the university, “with all the attendant, and well justified, fears for one’s career or treatment”.
Even in situations where the academic community considers its EDI team’s views about ‘whiteness’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘decolonisation’ to be wholly correct the situation is no better, he says, since “the protection of received wisdom from challenge can turn it into JS Mill’s ‘dead dogma’ – mantras that need not justify themselves, that are placed above question. And the recent Cass Report into the serious medical risks posed by the hitherto institutionally endorsed ‘affirmative’ model for treating gender confused children and adolescents reveals how dangerous this can be.
