A racist duchess

She is probably just being politically correct but her view that people should be judged by their race is undoubtedly racist

Different people have different abilities and members of different races have different abilities.  Blacks have a major presence in two major sectors of the economy: Sport and Entertainment.  Should we therefore have policies designed to get more whites into those sectors?  Should it be a law that at least 80% of the players in a football team must be whites? If not, why not? And if such policies would be wrong in sport, why are such policies right in academe?  Let people be judged by how good they are at what they do rather than their race


The Duchess of Sussex has shown her support for a campaign by black academics and students that aims to 'decolonise' university curriculum in the UK, it has emerged.

It is the 37-year-old's first apparently political intervention since she became part of the Royal Family, marrying Prince Harry last May.

The movement aims to 'confront the legacies of the empire' and racism on campuses and promotes black and female thinkers instead of 'male, pale and stale' ones.

It has now emerged that, during her January visit at City, University of London, in Islington Meghan encouraged scholars to 'open up the conversation' about curriculum in our universities and also reacted with shock at figures showing the misrepresentation of ethnicity in professor positions in universities.

The campaign she is backing has been a controversial movement since students took to the streets of Oxford in 2016 in an effort to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th Century colonialist and slave owner, removed from one of Oxford University's colleges.

It followed a similar #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa, which succeeded in having a statue of Rhodes removed from the University of Cape Town.

In January, in her new role as Patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) international organisation, the duchess expressed her surprise at the shockingly low figures of diversity in UK professors.

Upon being handed a sheet of data showing that UK professors are overwhelmingly white men, the duchess reportedly said: 'Oh my God.'

Dr Rachel Cowan, who supports ethnic minority and female staff at Manchester University, said: 'She was really surprised, she was like 'oh my god, really, we need to get a photograph of this'.'

The duchess also reportedly turned to her private secretary Amy Pickering and asked her to take a picture of the data relating to 2016-17.

Meghan said universities should 'open a debate' in a bid to avoid 'continuing with the daily rote' because 'sometimes that approach can be really antiquated and needs an update.'

Research from Advance HE revealed 68% of UK professors were white males, 23% white female, 6.5% black and minority ethnic (BME) male and 2% BME female.

Meera Sabaratnam, leading the working party to decolonise the curriculum at SOAS, University of London and whose data inspired Meghan's 'Oh my God' comment, agreed that 'change is long overdue'.

She told The Sunday Times: 'Many of the issues around racial equality are similar and it is great to see her embrace this. Change is long overdue.'

The reaction of the duchess to the lack of diversity among scholars may be due in part to her upbringing and her 'impactful' and 'pivotal' experience in university in the US.

African-American authors are widely studied in US universities and statistics on the ethnic profiles of students and staff are published on university websites.

Meera Sabaratnam said US universities have 'a legacy of affirmative action.'

Meghan graduated from Northwestern University, Illinois, with a joint Bachelor of Arts degrees in theatre and international relations in 2003.

In October, the duchess was praised for giving a 'powerful' speech on feminism and women's suffrage in New Zealand on 125th anniversary of women achieving the right to vote in the country.

In her last display of political concern, Meghan spoke about economic and social development and the rights of women in developing countries.

She said: 'Everyone should be afforded the opportunity to receive the education they want, but more importantly the education they have the right to receive.

'And for women and girls in developing countries, this is vital.

'Providing them with access to education is the key to economic and social development.'

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The rebirth of racial stereotypes in Britain

The campaign to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ is demeaning to ethnic-minority students.

Student campaigns to ‘decolonise’ higher education started to take off almost five years ago. Even back then, there was very little that was truly radical about them. From UCL’s ‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ project to the international ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, the rallying cry of ‘decolonise’ allowed privileged students to tilt at an entirely fictitious notion of universities as the last bastions of empire.

In reality, rather than providing a safe space for elbow-patched professors desperately clinging on to patriarchal, whites-only reading lists, universities were already busy internationalising and diversifying the curriculum. Academics unable or unwilling to defend a disciplinary canon were quite happy to point to inclusivity as the determiner of course content. Far from threatening the foundations of the university, protesting students pushed at an open door and inside found a seat at the departmental table.

So perhaps it is no surprise that the Office for Students, the national regulatory body for higher education, has commissioned and published research urging academics to consider how they ‘draw on “non-western” and non-white forms of knowledge’ in teaching. Lecturers are encouraged to ask themselves: ‘Are our curricular practices dominated by Eurocentric voices? How can we decolonise our teaching and learning practices so that we recognise and respect other voices?’ An example of an ‘inclusive intervention’ that can be used to target students from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds is ‘a review of a curriculum to specifically include black-Caribbean authors’.

What is remarkable about this guidance is just how old hat it is. The push to discover forgotten women authors and include them on reading lists took off decades ago. Universities have been internationalising the curriculum for several years. Not only are diverse reading lists often insisted upon, but some universities attach the proviso that all names be written out in full so that women can be clearly identified. On some courses, new modules covering issues of race and identity have been drawn up and new, more inclusive exam questions have been written.

Certainly, university lecturers and schoolteachers should keep under review what gets taught. Just because a particular book or author has had a place on a reading list for the past quarter of a century doesn’t mean it automatically deserves a place for the next 25 years. But the movement to decolonise education goes further than just calling for a review of course content. In promoting the notion that irredeemably racist universities play out a legacy of colonialism and can only be saved through the widespread adoption of simplistic solutions, the decolonise movement does more harm than good. It creates problems that should trouble anyone concerned not just with higher education, but with racial equality, too.

Too often, the decolonise movement draws upon patronising and racist stereotypes about black students. Kingston University changed its geography course on rural Britain following concern that it ‘normalised white experiences’. It was assumed that black and ethnic-minority students were less likely to visit the countryside and could therefore struggle ‘to grasp concepts such as the “rural idyll”’. So the course has been redesigned to encompass ‘rural areas globally, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia’. But why should black students struggle with the concept of a ‘rural idyll’ any more than other students? And why should a black kid born and bred in a British city be expected to feel more affinity for rural Africa than the English countryside? New life is being breathed into jaded old stereotypes.

The push to get black-Caribbean authors on to reading lists suggests that the most significant factor about an author is not their contribution to the discipline being studied, but their skin colour. The life and works of Toussaint L’Ouverture and CLR James are well worth studying — but I’m convinced neither man would welcome inclusion in the curriculum simply to fill a quota for black-Caribbeans. For years women and black writers fought against being labelled according to their gender and skin colour and to have their ideas recognised in their own right.

The decolonise movement assumes a key cause of underperformance by black students at university is a result of them not seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum. At Oxford University, history degrees are reported to have moved away from a ‘narrow focus on British and European history’ with a new compulsory module on ‘global history’. This will, apparently, allow students to study ‘black heroes such as Steve Biko, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Stuart Hall’. Robert Gildea, a professor of modern history at Oxford, told The Sunday Times: ‘Black and ethnic-minority students are being encouraged to apply to Oxford with the idea that, once they are here, they will recognise themselves and what interests them in the syllabus. If a student arrived to do a degree that was all about the Anglo-Saxons and the Tudors and Winston Churchill, they might think: what is in this for me?’

This assumes that the whole point of education is a narcissistic focus on the self. But education should take us beyond ourselves, it should open up new horizons and help us learn about the world and other people in it. If we only learn about people who look like us then we risk learning very little. I may be a white woman but I want to read novels by James Baldwin and I want to learn about Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the US Congress and author of the fabulously titled Unbought and Unbossed. By the same token, I want black students to be able to read white novelists and philosophers and, yes, to learn about the Anglo-Saxons and Winston Churchill.

The decolonise movement seeks to challenge racial biases in higher education that have long since been called into question. In constructing a racist academy and then proposing a project of tokenism in order to challenge it, it winds up not only degrading education, but also rehabilitating old stereotypes and prejudices.

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School should open children’s minds or provide them with job skills?  There is room for both

Would another radical change to GCSEs and A-Levels benefit pupils in England? Robert Halfon MP, chair of the House of Commons education select committee, thinks so. He has proposed sweeping changes.

He thinks GCSEs should be scrapped and A-levels should be replaced by a mix of academic and vocational subjects. As with every proposed radical education policy, Halfon’s suggestions are unlikely to be taken forward as a whole, but they do raise serious questions about education in the 21st century.

Halfon has criticised GCSEs as ‘pointless’ and warns that skills shortages in the labour market are a consequence. He says the oncoming ‘march of the robots’ could remove a quarter of jobs, and so our education system needs to prepare children for this new reality. Behind his talk of knowledge engagement, providing children with skills for business and industry is Halfon’s real aim.

Haven’t we heard this all before? Successive governments since the Butler Education Act of 1944 have attempted to reform the curriculum to meet the changing needs of industry and the economy – and all have failed. No one knows what the jobs of tomorrow will be, what they will look like, and what specific skills they will require. While it’s important that we do something as educators and a society to equip children for life after school, this is not the answer.

What children need is an engaging curriculum, led by passionate subject specialists, that enables them to think deeply, independently and flexibly. The only way to achieve this is through a traditional education system that promotes knowledge, creativity and gives teachers the space to explore ideas with their pupils.

Our education system should be geared towards equipping children with the best that has been thought and said, so that they may go on to create, adapt, develop and transform the world around them. A focus on skills, acronyms, fads and buzzwords fails to do this. There’s a reason PPE graduates are the most sought after. They have a broad range of knowledge, the ability to think creatively and apply their knowledge to different areas. While not all children can go on to study PPE at Oxbridge, this is still something we can learn from.

The education system needs reform, but it is to the past that we should be looking, not an unknown future. We must equip children with the knowledge to transform the world, not the skills to fit into it.

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