Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors
Lecturers pushed to include more black authors in courses after protest by students
CAMBRIDGE University’s English literature professors will be forced to replace white authors with black writers, under proposals put forward by academic staff following student demands to “decolonise” the curriculum.
For the first time, lecturers and tutors will have to “ensure the presence” of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) writers on their courses, under plans discussed by the English faculty’s teaching forum.
The move follows an open letter, penned by Lola Olufemi, Cambridge University Students’ Union women’s officer, and signed by more than 100 students, titled “Decolonising the English Faculty”.
“For too long, teaching English at Cambridge has encouraged a ‘traditional’ and ‘canonical’ approach that elevates white male authors at the expense of all others,” the letter said.
“What we can no longer ignore, however, is the fact that the curriculum, taken as a whole, risks perpetuating institutional racism.”
They said that they are not seeking to exclude white men from reading lists. However, adding new BME texts and topics is likely to lead to authors being downgraded or dropped altogether, since there are no plans to lengthen courses to accommodate an expansion of reading materials.
Minutes from the teaching forum’s meeting earlier this month, seen by The Daily Telegraph, reveal the actions discussed by academics to address the students’ concerns. One of the “points for action” is for Subject Group Committees (SGCS) –which are made up of academic staff- to “actively seeking to ensure the presence of BME [black and minority ethnic) texts and topics on lecture lists”.
The teaching forum also suggests that SGCS take editorial control of reading list folders and “actively encourage sharing of reading suggestions” of BME writers and topics. They also suggest an introductory course of lectures in the first week of the academic year to “offer perspectives on the global contexts and history of English Literature”.
The minutes were sent out to students on behalf of Professor Peter De Bolla, the English faculty chairman who heads the teaching forum, a new institution that was set up for academic staff to discuss the curriculum and teaching issues.
Gill Evans, emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at Cambridge, said there are some “major problems” with this approach. “It goes with the calls to stop teaching predominantly Western or European history as well as literature,” she said.
“If you distort the content of history and literature syllabuses to insert a statistically diverse or equal proportion of material from cultures taken globally you surely lose sight of the historical truth that the West explored the world from the 16th century and took control – colonially or otherwise – of a very large part of it. It is false to pretend that never happened.”
She pointed out that any literature added to the syllabus “for the sake of an artificial balance” will have to be “largely in translation for monoglot English students so it will itself be distorted”. Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a teaching fellow at Churchill College and member of the teaching forum, welcomed the move. “Britain has a long history of contact with the rest of the world, not least through the imperial project, and that impacted what we call ‘English literature’ very thoroughly,” she said.
♦ More than 100 MPS have urged the vice-chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge to take “urgent action” to address the lack of applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. The letter, organised by the Labour MP David Lammy, has received 108 signatures, including Robert Halfon, chairman of the Commons education committee.