QAA urges universities to “decolonise” and acknowledge West’s “white supremacy”

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which advises universities on course standards and degree content, has for the first time introduced advice on decolonising courses (Epoch Times ,?GB News ,?LBC ). 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 ).

This week it was reported that the body had updated its benchmarks, telling higher education providers to teach about “colonialism”, “white supremacy” and “class division” (Mail ,?Telegraph ,?Unherd ).

In one example, the QAA told universities that “computing ” courses should address “how divisions and hierarchies of colonial value are replicated and reinforced” within the subject.

In the “geography ” document academics are told that the “core values underpinning geography’s inclusive learning community” should be “informed” in part by theoretical concepts and ideas drawn from “critical race theory”; that is, a divisive, racialised offshoot of critical theory, which, in turn, was the brainchild of the ‘Frankfurt School’, a group of 20th century cultural Marxists.

The “classics and ancient history ” benchmark advises that such courses “must now engage with and explain” the connections between the subject and “imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and class division”.

Meanwhile, the QAA consultation document on “maths ” curriculums suggests that they “should present a multicultural and decolonised view of mathematics, statistics and operational research, informed by the student voice”, while the equivalent document for “economics ” invites respondents to consider whether students should be taught that it is “still predominantly a white, male and Western field”.

And so the long march through the institutions continues.

Reflecting on the significance of the QAA’s updates for the?Mail , Professor Frank Furedi points out that in contrast with universities in totalitarian states like China, which promote government doctrine, our universities have always been autonomous and free to decide on their courses and their content. What charities like the QAA and, for that matter, the “egregiously woke ” Advance HE, have exposed, however, is that in our “unusually centralised” system, bad ideas that emerge among one particular cadre of activists-cum-academics can quickly be integrated into the systems and procedures of other universities. That’s why Professor Furedi believes the QAA’s updated benchmark statements may end up dealing “a catastrophic blow to freedom of speech and the academic rigour it supports”, turning universities into “indoctrination factories” which take their cue from a de facto “central political body: the QAA”.

John Armstrong, Reader in Financial Mathematics at King’s College London, feels much the same way. The QAA’s attempts to embed ‘decolonisation’ into mathematics are not just “objectionable” on their own terms, but also “symptomatic of a more general trend for the charity to try and dictate what universities should teach” (Spectator ,?Mail ). It’s telling, he says, that the QAA’s benchmark document defining the common mathematics curriculum “has grown in length by 50 per cent in just three years”. This top-down approach is “antithetical to the academically led approach that should be the hallmark of higher education” and is now “slowly homogenising university teaching and diminishing true diversity of thought”.

Speaking to Mark Steyn about the issue on?GB News , FSU General Secretary Toby Young pointed out that the problem with all this talk about the need for peoples’ thought structures to be ‘decolonised’ is that it cuts both ways. Take the UK-based academics who prepared the QAA’s updated benchmark statements on the charity’s behalf — isn’t it the case that in “propagating the cult of woke”, as Toby put it, these 21st century beneficiaries of the enlightened, European notion of the liberal academy have done little more than demonstrate the extent to which their own minds have been colonised by the divisive, race baiting identity politics of the US higher education system’s grievance studies sector? Perhaps the doyenne of postcolonial theory, Franz Fanon, was right after all when he wrote in his magnum opus,?The Wretched of the Earth?(1961), that the problem with colonialism is that it is never “satisfied merely with emptying the native’s brain of all form and content” but that “by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it”.

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