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Epilogue: What We Have Learned
- Edited by Abby Day, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lois Lee, University of Kent, Canterbury, Dave S. P. Thomas, University of Kent, Canterbury, James Spickard
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- Book:
- Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 May 2022, pp 251-263
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Summary
We began this project about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. We sent the publisher our final manuscript just as the wealthy democracies began to reap the benefit of the vaccines that they had both developed and hoarded. Poorer countries need those vaccines but cannot get them. COVID-19 highlights the same lines of inequality that afflict higher education: elites benefit while others fall behind. Here are two other pandemic/education parallels:
• The virus hit working-class and minority communities harder than others because they lack equal access to advanced medicine and because their jobs do not typically give them the freedom of working safely from home. This parallels those communities’ lack of equal educational opportunities, including access to the libraries, the technological tools, and the time away from paid work that elite students take for granted. This structural discrimination is in addition to the personal prejudice along ethnic, gender, and other lines that has dogged higher education for decades.
• The virus spread along the same globally connected trade routes that once brought sugar, spices, and slaves to benefit European and American upper classes. Those routes have more recently brought refugees and voluntary migrants, who have increased Western democracies’ ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity without, however, having gained equal respect. We find it telling that one of the first vaccines for COVID-19 was developed by a pair of German scientists of Turkish descent, a group long excluded from German intellectual life (Sauerbrey, 2020). What other good ideas might be percolating among those whom our universities traditionally ignore?
Yet the COVID pandemic highlights more than our inequalities; it highlights a transformation in universities’ economic role. The fact that university-based research contributed so much to the anti-COVID fight tells us that higher education is no longer an ivory tower, nor (just) a repository of cultural tradition. It is a chief prop for the new ‘knowledge economy’.
Cutting-edge technology is no longer born in garages and tinkerers’ workshops; it emerges from university laboratories and from the tech giants’ research centres built nearby.
Introduction: Why Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Matter
- Edited by Abby Day, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lois Lee, University of Kent, Canterbury, Dave S. P. Thomas, University of Kent, Canterbury, James Spickard
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- Book:
- Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 May 2022, pp 1-18
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Summary
We live in an increasingly diverse society. In person and in our media spaces, we encounter people from different racial and ethnic groups, of different genders and sexual orientations, with different religions, education levels, incomes, occupations, languages, marital and family statuses, age, physical and mental abilities, and geographic origins. And we interact with them. Our democratic and humanistic ideals call us to respect them and to treat them as we all wish to be treated.
At the same time, our core institutions remain dominated by a small elite, crudely equated to ‘White men of the Global North’ (see Ahmed, 2017). This elite offers a much narrower set of perspectives and interests than are found in our diverse populations. For universities, this means that people from a small set of identity categories still dominate the production and dissemination of academic knowledge in teaching, writing, and research. The dominance of such elites poses challenges to all supposedly democratic institutions. In academic life, it distorts the knowledge that universities produce; it ill-serves students, most acutely those from non-dominant groups; and it threatens the humanistic values on which the modern university is founded.
Euro-American universities have long seen themselves as keepers of the Western tradition: that (imagined) constellation of Enlightenment values that proclaimed itself to be humanity’s highest achievement and promised a ‘mission civilisatrice’ that would improve life around the world. Those values included equality, individual freedom, and the importance of the pursuit of truth. These were seen both as good in themselves and as pathways to social flourishing. That is why university scholars were given the freedom to teach, to write, and to learn: only by doing so could they discover the truths that are supposed to set us all free.
Ironically, though, the scholarly pursuit of truth has revealed large gaps between these universities’ values and their actual practices. Among other things:
• Universities do not treat people equally. Despite some progress, they continue to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, national origin, and a host of other attributes. They allow those with favoured status to join their student bodies and faculties; disfavoured groups are either admitted grudgingly or barred. This discrimination is often covert, but it is effective at keeping White male professional-class men – or people who act like them – at the top of the heap.
7 - Pluralised Realities: Reviewing Reading Lists to Make Them More Culturally Sensitive
- Edited by Abby Day, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lois Lee, University of Kent, Canterbury, Dave S. P. Thomas, University of Kent, Canterbury, James Spickard
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- Book:
- Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 May 2022, pp 110-124
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Summary
The aim of creating distance in relation to the Eurocentric tradition is to open analytical spaces for realities that are ‘surprising’ because they are new or have been ignored or made invisible, that is, deemed non-existent by the Eurocentric critical tradition … keeping distance does not mean discarding the rich Eurocentric critical tradition and throwing it into the dustbin of history. … It means including it in a much broader landscape of epistemological and political possibilities. It means exercising hermeneutics of suspicion regarding its ‘foundational truths’ by uncovering what lies below their ‘face value’. It means giving special attention to the suppressed or marginalized smaller traditions within the big Western tradition. (De Sousa Santos, 2014, p 44)
True global history is only possible to the extent that both Ethnocentrism and Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism, both Occidentalism and orientalism are superseded. Such history is more accurate on the epistemological level and more progressive on the social, political and cultural. Only this kind of history will allow the world to recognize itself in its infinite diversity. (Jack Goody, as cited in De Sousa Santos, 2014, p 100)
Introduction
Most Westerners think that the world’s first university was founded in Bologna in 1088 CE. They are wrong, Al-Qarawiyyin University in Fes el-Bali, Morocco, was founded 170 years earlier, in 859, by Fatima al-Fihri. UNESCO (nd) considers it the oldest existing, continuously operating, degree-granting university in the world. Its library housed a huge collection of manuscripts, including a 9th-century Qur’an. It taught medicine, mathematics, English literature, and Maliki law (one of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence), plus many other subjects. Nalanda University in India was established even earlier, in 415 CE. It provides the first example of what we now think of as university-level higher education (Bhattacharyya and Guha, 2018). Gundishapur University in Iran (531 CE– 832 CE) was the most important medical centre and higher learning institution in the world during the 6th and 7th centuries (Azizi, 2008), with a pivotal role in the history of mathematics as well as a teaching speciality of philosophy, architecture, and geometry; the library had 259 rooms and contained approximately 400,000 books (Zamiri, 1995, p 64).