Dear Vice Chancellor BLM Commitment Plan: whose stalking horse? I write to express my concern about the university’s Statement on Black Lives Matter (BLM) and subsequent BLM Commitment Plan. These strike me as polemics and I dissent from the arguments and policies set out. Let me indulge in my own polemic in response. I note […]
Letter to a Vice-Chancellor by a DDU member No.1
Dear Pro-Vice Chancellor, I’m writing this letter in response to the email you sent out to all students and staff at the university, following the tragic police-killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, in May this year. I am sure you mean well and are only sending out the kind of message currently being delivered in […]
What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?
“What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?” asks David Butterfield in The Spectator: Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar? Are classicists really promoting ‘white people’ as racially supreme over the rest of humankind? Given that racial discrimination is at once repulsive and illegal, just how guilty is present-day academia? In a fair […]
Academic Decolonisation: The Slippery Slope of Dismantling Knowledge
The discourse surrounding academic decolonisation furnishes today’s intellectual and moralistic justifications for racism, argues Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert Although some proponents of decolonisation education claim to be humanising academic knowledge, all they are really doing is stripping it of its important, potentially transformative features. Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash