On 1 August, key provisions of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act came into effect, obligating English universities to promote and protect free speech and academic freedom. Despite advanced warning of these changes, including a year-long delay of commencement by the Government, many higher education providers still have policies that are now highly likely to be illegal. One of these is the University of Westminster.
According to members of the University, there is significant and consistent pressure to change reading lists and the structure of modules to ensure that staff and students are “re-evaluating our assumptions about how we teach and what we teach” to “create a safer principled learning space for us all”. This means changing the authors included in the curriculum, the theories taught, and even research methods. The pressure is particularly strong in the humanities, but also extends to “harder” subjects like law and bioscience.
These efforts are part of a larger EDI Strategy, which defines the institution’s values as “Progressive, Compassionate, and Responsible”. This policy document includes a long list of “Strategic Aims”, one of which is to “continue to extend our work on decolonising and diversifying the curriculum and teaching practices”.
To assist academics in excising dead, white male authors from the syllabus, Westminster has created a “Decolonising the Curriculum Toolkit”, which, recognising “the varying decolonising needs for each discipline”, offers “an introductory reading list, followed by lists for each subject area taught at the University”.
This project covers all aspects of the London-based institution. For example, the Library Guide offers a range of resources that can strengthen the “Decolonising practices [in the] various academic disciplines we study, research, teach and work in”. Among the highlights are a paper titled “Towards a decolonial feminist fashion design reading list”, a podcast episode on “Decolonising architecture”, and an article explaining how “Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with its Software”.
These are just silly add-ons for students or staff who have nothing better to do, but the attempt to transform the curriculum at Westminster go significantly further. A project called “Pedagogies for Social Justice” encourages members of the University “begin thinking about and engaging in decolonising teaching and learning”, and provides an extensive reading list that can help “diversify” the material in a wide range of subjects.
For instance, the “resource” for courses in the biosciences (i.e. Medicine, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, etc.) begins by recommending several readings on why decolonisation “must be done throughout ‘non-humanities’ subjects with the same kind of critical nature as the humanities” and why “scientists, in general, must decolonise themselves”. Once module convenors have figured out what on earth that latter part means, they can move on to the other recommended adjustments, such as exploring the process of “Indigenizing the Biosciences” and the topic of “Biocolonialism”.
As a quick guide to the objectiveness of these resources, the biosciences page asserts as a matter of fact that “there is no mistake that there is a racial and nation-based bias in bioscience”, specifically from “white, colonial-settler groups”. The guide go on to make similarly rigid statements for criminology, law and even computer science and engineering. In case you are wondering, the last one apparently requires reflection “on how the curriculum needs to be broken from colonialistic practices”, so that our expert programmers can finally design “the Curriculum around Justice”.
It gets still worse. According to a member of the law department, who spoke on condition of anonymity, academics at Westminster University are required “to submit evidence of how they are Decolonising the Curriculum” in order “for courses and modules to be validated and revalidated”. This practice is likely to be illegal. Paragraph 193 of the Office for Students Free Speech guidance specifically states that providers “should ensure that decisions about the curriculum and the way it is delivered: a. safeguard the autonomy of individual academics to teach and communicate lawful ideas that may be controversial or unpopular or that some (or many) find offensive; and b. do not restrict the exposure to students of such ideas”.
Concerted pressure to change reading lists and other aspects of the curriculum to align with the project of “decolonisation” is a clear violation of this regulatory expectation. However, there is some doubt as to whether this policy still persists as a formal practice. According to our source at the University, “policies are [now] likely to be under review”, but there has been no clear communication that this requirement has been scrapped for good.
Even if overt pressure to “decolonise” the curriculum has disappeared, the informal pressure and direct opining on the inherent biases of various subject displayed in the “Pedagogies for Social Justice” project is deeply objectionable. Universities have no business lecturing their academics on the political problems of their subject nor should they be encouraging them, informally or otherwise, to change the reading lists to align with some ideological conception of how a curriculum is designed “around Justice”.
We strongly urge the University of Westminster to scrap this practice to ensure its compliance with the free speech laws and regulations in this country.
Want to stay up to date with stories like this? Click below to receive regular CAF updates straight to your inbox.