The Decolonization Reckoning Universities Would Rather Avoid

Universities have spent the years since George Floyd’s murder adopting the language of decolonization, but Jason Arday says the substance has barely begun: progress in higher education is, by his estimate, “probably less than 10 percent”. His criticism deserves attention—not because every claim survives examination, but because it exposes the gap between institutional publicity and institutional proof.

Arday is not an outsider throwing stones at a building he has never entered. He has worked as a consultant, researcher and advocate inside the British university system, and in 2023 became the youngest Black professor appointed by Cambridge. The BBC’s account of his career records a remarkable route from childhood autism and global developmental delay, through a late struggle with speech and literacy, to a professorship in sociology of education. ¹ His authority on the subject is therefore both professional and biographical.

But authority is not evidence. That distinction is the central issue in the argument over “decolonizing the curriculum”. A university can have a history of exclusion without every present disparity proving discrimination. A medical textbook can show too few examples of darker skin without the scientific method itself becoming culturally relative. A reform can be well-intentioned and still be badly designed.

Arday’s most useful contribution is his demand that institutions confront those distinctions. His weakest move is to treat skepticism about his framework as evidence of the problem the framework is designed to reveal. We see this move all the time from progressives. They use proof of racism against a person accused of racism if they say “I have Black friends” or “My partner is Black”!

The university’s new vocabulary has outrun its evidence

“Decolonization” arrived in British higher education as a serious historical question. Colonial powers did not merely govern territories. They extracted wealth, classified populations, shaped institutions and built systems of knowledge in which European authority was often treated as the natural measure of the world. The subject cannot be dismissed as a fashionable invention simply because universities have since turned the word into a slogan.

Yet the movement’s institutional success has created a problem of its own. Once a term appears in strategy documents, prospectuses, staff-development programs and public statements, it begins to acquire the characteristics of a brand. Universities can announce a commitment before agreeing on a definition. Departments can claim progress because a reading list contains more authors from outside Europe. A committee can produce an audit without demonstrating that the audit changed teaching, recruitment or research outcomes.

Arday’s keynote to the Society for Experimental Biology’s symposium on biosciences education was built around that contradiction. He described decolonization as a “franchise” that had followed earlier institutional words such as inclusion and diversity. In his account, each term begins as a response to a real problem, is adopted by universities, and is then softened into a portable administrative product. It can be placed beside almost any subject—medicine, physics, sociology, literature or biology—without first establishing what the subject’s alleged colonial inheritance consists of.

The criticism is hard to answer when the institutions using the term cannot answer a simple question: what, precisely, are they decolonizing? A curriculum? A discipline’s history? The composition of its staff? The assumptions behind its methods? The relationship between universities and the communities affected by their research? These are not interchangeable objectives. Each requires different evidence and different remedies.

Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his doctorate, describes decolonizing the curriculum as a long-running effort to ensure that knowledge and practice from different peoples are valued in post-colonial higher education. Its public resources point to the influence of student campaigns, including Rhodes Must Fall, and offer examples intended to help staff examine curriculum content and teaching practice. ² That is more concrete than a slogan. But it still leaves the institution with the difficult task of showing which intervention produced which result.

The word is often presented as if it carries its own moral proof. It does not. A policy should be judged by its aim, its method, its cost and its consequences. If a university cannot state the problem in measurable terms, it cannot know whether the remedy has worked. If it cannot tolerate criticism while testing the remedy, it is not conducting an inquiry. It is enforcing a vocabulary.

There has been progress, but the headline numbers need discipline

One reason the debate becomes so heated is that the underlying problem is real. The pipeline into academic research is not equally open to all groups. In 2019, the Leading Routes report, based on a Freedom of Information request to UK Research and Innovation, stated that 245 of 19,868 UKRI-funded PhD studentships awarded over three academic years went to Black or Black Mixed students. That was 1.2 per cent; only 30 awards went to students from Black Caribbean backgrounds. ³

The figure is striking. It is also incomplete. It tells the reader how many awards were made, but not how many eligible applicants there were, how many applications were successful by ethnicity, which disciplines were involved, what proportion of candidates had the required qualifications, or whether subject preferences and prior attainment affected the pool. Without those denominators, the number establishes under-representation. It does not by itself identify the mechanism that produced it.

That is not a pedantic objection. If Black applicants constituted 1.2 percent of the relevant applicant pool and received 1.2 percent of awards, the distribution would be numerically equal even though the total would remain troubling. If Black applicants made up 5 percent of the pool but received 1.2 percent of awards, the evidence of unequal selection would be stronger. If applications were concentrated in subjects with fewer funded places, the interpretation would change again. The same headline can support different explanations.

Leading Routes says its report influenced policy and helped prompt an £8 million commitment from Research England and UKRI to widen participation for Black and Asian researchers. That is a legitimate policy response to a worrying disparity. But policy urgency should not be confused with causal certainty. A government can decide to widen a pipeline because the numbers are unacceptable while still investigating why the numbers look that way.

The university sector has also seen visible changes in undergraduate admissions. Oxford reported that more than 22 percent of UK undergraduates admitted in 2019 came from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds, up from 18 percent the previous year. The share of Black students rose from 2.6 to 3.1 percent. ⁴ Those figures are not evidence that every equality problem has been solved, but they are evidence against the idea that nothing changed before 2020.

That timing matters. The 2019 Oxford figures predated Floyd’s death and the institutional wave that followed it. The increase cannot be credited to the post-2020 explosion of branding, statements and emergency committees. Nor can it be dismissed as irrelevant because the overall proportion of Black students remained modest. The honest account is more prosaic: some access measures were already producing movement; the later political moment intensified attention and expanded the language used to describe it.

The table below shows that, at least for an elite university like Oxford, low numbers do not mean huge underrepresentation! I think some people imagine that Black people are 20% of the population? The table below should show that representation is very close to equal. If people find the slight under-representation to be a huge concern, we should maybe examine that 95% of the prison population are men as a more pressing issue?

In the US, we say people have an issue with Asians being overrepresented; some say at the expense of African Americans!

Arday is right to resist a complacent “job done” response. The figures show progress through one part of the system, not equality across the whole system. But the opposite error is to treat every improvement as cosmetic and every remaining disparity as proof of a single cause. Serious journalism—and serious policy—must keep both facts in view.

What the Black and minority ethnic label hides

The acronym BAME has been criticised for compressing very different experiences into one administrative category. That criticism is sound. “Black and minority ethnic” sounds as though it describes a single constituency, when the data often show sharp differences between groups, generations, regions, social classes and migration histories.

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities made this point in its education chapter, arguing that collective BAME-versus-White comparisons can obscure more than they explain. It identified parental income, family educational background, geography, family structure and attitudes towards education as factors that help produce different outcomes. It also reported that, once socio-economic status was taken into account, most major ethnic minority groups performed better than White British pupils, with Black Caribbean pupils and, at some points, Pakistani pupils showing different patterns. ⁵

The commission’s conclusions were controversial, and critics argued that they underplayed institutional racism. That criticism should be heard. Schools and universities are not neutral machines. Teachers, admissions officers and supervisors make judgments, and judgments can be affected by prejudice, expectation and institutional habit. The fact that one group succeeds in a system does not prove that every other group faces no barrier inside it.

It does, however, show why the broadest version of the racism explanation is insufficient. If Black African pupils can outperform White British pupils while Black Caribbean pupils, on some measures, perform less well, skin color alone cannot be the complete explanation. The relevant questions turn to migration history, family expectations, neighbourhoods, social class, school quality, cultural norms, and the differing experiences of communities often treated as one.

This is where the language of “structural racism” can become too elastic. Used carefully, it can describe rules and routines that produce unequal outcomes without an openly racist decision. Used carelessly, it becomes a conclusion disguised as a starting point. A disparity is observed; the disparity is called structural; the label is then cited as proof that the structure is racist. That is not analysis. It is a circle.

The government’s Race Disparity Audit was created to do something more useful: assemble data across education, employment, health, housing, crime and public services so that differences could be examined rather than merely asserted. ⁶ Its existence does not settle the argument, and its interpretation is open to challenge. But it embodies the right instinct. Break the categories down. Identify the stage at which the gap emerges. Compare like with like. Test competing explanations.

Refusing that discipline has a political cost. Black people are a small minority in Britain, not the enormous share of the population that casual public impressions can suggest. Within that minority, outcomes vary. If policy treats all Black students as equally disadvantaged, it may direct resources away from the groups facing the sharpest obstacles. If it treats every ethnic disparity as a race problem, it may miss the working-class children—Black, White, Asian and mixed-race—whose barriers are material rather than racial.

The strongest case for reform comes from the laboratory.

Arday’s most persuasive example concerns medical education. He asked whether signs used to identify skin cancer appear in the same way on patients with darker complexions as they do on white patients. In many cases, the answer is no. A medical curriculum dominated by images of white skin can leave students less confident when examining other patients, with technical consequences rather than symbolic ones.

Research on skin-of-colour teaching supports the underlying concern. A review of dermatological education reported that internal medicine trainees misdiagnosed common conditions, including melanoma, eczema, and psoriasis, at high rates when presented in darker skin, and that trainees were less likely to refer patients with skin of colour to dermatology. ⁷ A medical school curriculum that includes a wider range of images is not indulging in political fashion. It is improving the information available to clinicians.

But the conclusion does not follow that because the teaching material has been narrow, the scientific method is “Eurocentric” in the sense that its truths belong to one racial group. The problem is not that biology obeys European politics. The problem is that researchers and teachers made incomplete choices about which patients to study, which photographs to publish, and which examples to place before students. I don’t think the scientific method belongs to ethnicity; it would be like saying mathematics is white? And yes, some people believe maths is whiteness, but I disagree.

We have to look at other situations where minorities exist. Isolated minority groups settling among other isolated populations can show shifted rates of genetic disorders and disease predispositions. South Koreans in Japan, who make up less than 0.5 percent of the population and are often visually indistinguishable, illustrate the point. A doctor treating such a patient may initially prioritise conditions according to Japanese prevalence patterns. Once the patient’s Korean background becomes known, those priorities would be reassessed—provided research confirms the shift materially affects diagnosis or care.

That distinction is crucial. The remedy for a biased sample is a better sample. The remedy for a missing clinical image is a more representative image library. The remedy for a diagnostic failure is improved training, better data and outcome monitoring. None of those reforms requires abandoning the idea that a claim should be tested, replicated and capable of being disproved. In the UK, the presence of non-whites in communities is lumpy. Places like London and Birmingham are very different mixtures and densities of non-white people.

Arday’s challenge to “notions of absolute truth” in science also needs a sharper formulation. Scientific knowledge is not a collection of eternal slogans. It changes when evidence changes. Its claims are provisional, but they are not arbitrary. I think that a law of chemistry does not become true or false according to the identity of the person reading the textbook. A drug either performs better than a placebo under a properly designed trial or it does not, within the limits of the evidence. Of course, we now know there is an ethnicity component; drug trials and monitoring must include sufficient ethnicities!

There are two different disputes here. One is about who has been included in the production and teaching of knowledge. The other is about what counts as knowledge. The first demands scrutiny and reform. The second must remain open to argument, but it cannot be settled by replacing one orthodoxy with another. When decolonisation moves from correcting blind spots to questioning whether evidence has authority at all, it risks undermining the very tool needed to demonstrate unequal treatment.

Science is not innocent of history. European empires funded research, classified people, and used scientific language to justify domination. That history should be taught. Scientists should also be expected to identify where their datasets are narrow or their institutions exclusionary. But history does not turn every scientific proposition into a matter of identity. The intellectual task is to separate the origin of a practice from the validity of a result.

The unpaid labour problem is real—and the proposed cure is uncertain

Arday’s criticism of institutional labour is harder to dismiss. Universities routinely ask minority staff to sit on equality committees, mentor students, advise on curriculum changes, respond to incidents, attend consultation meetings and explain the institution to itself. That work can be essential. It can also be invisible at promotion time.

Academic advancement is usually measured through research, grants, teaching and formal leadership. The work of “citizenship”—the daily activity of making an institution function for people who do not experience it in the same way as the majority—often sits outside those categories. The result is a familiar asymmetry: the university celebrates the initiative when it succeeds, while the minority staff who carried it are blamed or abandoned when it fails.

Arday described that arrangement in memorable terms. The public victory belongs to the institution; the failure belongs to the people doing the work. He argued that recent decolonising initiatives had placed Black and minority ethnic staff at the sharp end, requiring them to mobilise interventions at a cost to their physical and mental wellbeing without receiving professional recognition.

That is an argument for paying people, protecting their time, and counting the work. It is not automatically an argument for more decolonisation. If a program is poorly defined, coercive, and professionally unrewarded, the first response should be to redesign it—or stop it—rather than assume the solution is a deeper commitment to the same intellectual framework. Of course, many will say that in their work environment they have been subjected to hours of monologues from DEI practitioners, where no debate is allowed. Of course, we have then had the resultant pushback and rejection of the whole framework!

Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter presents a more institutional approach. It asks universities to assess their context, identify priorities and take evidence-based action across staff and student communities, with attention to representation, progression and success. ⁸ That model has obvious limitations: voluntary charters can become badges, and self-assessment can become self-congratulation. Yet its emphasis on data and institution-wide responsibility is more defensible than the assumption that a handful of minority staff should carry the reform by force of personal commitment.

A credible system would make the labour visible in several ways. Equality work should be allocated in job plans rather than smuggled into evenings. Promotion panels should know what was done and what it achieved. Staff should not be required to disclose painful personal experiences to make an institutional case. Students should have a route to challenge curricula without being recruited as unpaid campaigners. And universities should publish measures that can fail—not only statements that can be praised.

There is also a moral problem with treating minority academics as institutional evidence. A Black scholar may have expertise in race and education, but no person should be expected to represent an entire population or endorse a particular theory because of their skin colour. The progressive language of representation can reproduce the old habit of assigning people a racial function. The difference is that the assignment now arrives with a committee paper and a statement about inclusion.

George Floyd changed attention, not necessarily institutions

Arday argues that racism moved from the political periphery to the centre for roughly 15 to 18 months after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May 2020. The lockdown mattered because it left millions of people with fewer distractions and more time to watch the footage, discuss it and participate in protest. Universities responded with public commitments that might otherwise have taken years to appear.

His description of “disposable empathy” captures a real feature of modern politics. A shocking event can concentrate attention, produce statements and generate funding, only for the issue to recede when another crisis takes its place. The danger is that institutions respond to the emotional peak rather than build durable systems. A new committee is announced; a new vocabulary appears; a report is commissioned; then budgets tighten and the people responsible are left to keep the machinery running.

But Arday’s account also treats the decline of public attention as a moral failure. That is too simple. Democratic societies must process multiple claims at once. War, inflation, housing, crime, healthcare and education compete with racial justice for public attention. It is neither possible nor desirable for one issue to remain at the centre of politics indefinitely. A cause must survive the news cycle by demonstrating value, not by demanding permanent emotional priority.

The backlash against race language can have different sources. Some of it may be prejudice. Some may be irritation at institutional hypocrisy. Some may be exhaustion with being told that disagreement reveals hidden racism. Some may be fear that the definitions are so broad that no one can know what conduct is permitted. A serious reform movement should distinguish those reactions instead of treating them as one hostile bloc.

This matters because persuasion is not a decorative extra. Universities are public institutions. They educate people from communities that do not share the same political assumptions, and they spend money drawn from the public purse and from students who have not consented to every ideological experiment. A programme that cannot explain itself to working-class students, older graduates or sceptical staff is not automatically courageous. It may be badly designed.

The better test is durability. Does the reform continue after the campaign leaves the front page? Does it improve recruitment, teaching or student outcomes? Can a critic challenge it without risking professional punishment? Does it distinguish a knowledge gap from a moral disagreement? Can its supporters state what evidence would show that the programme had failed?

If the answer to those questions is no, the institution has not built anti-racist infrastructure. It has built a public-relations cycle. And when that cycle collapses, the resulting resentment may harm the people the institution claimed to support.

Arday’s own story points towards evidence, not away from it

The debate contains an irony. Arday’s personal story is a powerful argument against rigid assumptions about human potential. He couldn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. He trained as a physical-education teacher, studied at night and endured the rejection that accompanies academic publication before reaching senior posts and then Cambridge. His life demonstrates that institutions can misread people, that formal expectations can be crude and that a late start need not be a final verdict.

It also demonstrates the importance of agency. Arday’s mother, according to the story he tells, responded to his realisation about colonisation with the verdict that the point was common sense. Her remark is funny because it is unflattering. It suggests that grand theories can sometimes arrive after ordinary people have already understood the practical issue.

The same tension appears in the contrast with Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist whose grandmother’s practical judgments became questions to test with data. The point of the comparison is not that one family story proves a theory. It is that lived experience and empirical investigation can work together. A grandmother’s intuition may identify a hypothesis; it cannot replace the test.

That standard should apply to Arday’s claims. If Black researchers are underrepresented in funded PhD places, examine the applicant pool, success rates, supervisors, subjects, institutions, and the stages at which candidates leave the pipeline. If minority students receive different degree outcomes, compare assessment methods, prior attainment, course choice, belonging, supervision and financial pressure. If staff perform unpaid equality labour, measure time, recognition, promotion and retention.

Frameworks are not findings. Critical race theory, whiteness theory and decoloniality can help researchers ask questions about power, history and institutions. They can also lead researchers to see the same evidence through a preferred explanation. The answer is not to ban frameworks. It is to make them compete. A theory that claims racism is the main cause of a disparity should specify the mechanism and state what evidence would count against it.

This is where the counterargument to Arday becomes strongest. He asks STEM scholars to question assumptions that are treated as fixed. Fair enough. Sociologists should be asked the same. They should question the assumption that racial disparity is evidence of racial discrimination, that disagreement is a form of domination, and that a policy’s moral vocabulary validates its practical effects.

Research becomes credible when its supporters would accept an unwelcome result. A funding analysis might show bias. It might also show that applicant composition, subject choice, geography or prior education accounts for more of the gap. A curriculum review might reveal genuine exclusion. It might also show that some canonical material remains indispensable because it explains the subject better than the alternatives. The result should be allowed to surprise the investigator.

Disparity is not discrimination until the mechanism is shown

The argument over the “Broken Pipeline” illustrates a wider problem in equality policy. The language of proof often changes halfway through the analysis. A disparity is presented as evidence of structural racism, but when asked for the mechanism, advocates reply that the structure is difficult to see because it is structural. The explanation becomes unfalsifiable.

Several plausible mechanisms could explain why Black students receive fewer research council awards. Selection panels could hold conscious or unconscious bias. Informal networks could distribute opportunities unevenly. Supervisors could recruit from narrow circles. Applicants could have unequal access to guidance, research experience or institutional sponsorship. Funding rules could favour institutions whose students are less socially or economically diverse. Applicants could also be distributed unevenly by subject, geography or previous qualification.

Each mechanism predicts different evidence. Panel bias should appear as differential success after controlling for relevant qualifications and subject factors. Network effects should appear in supervisor, institution and recommendation patterns. Unequal preparation should appear before the funding decision. Subject concentration should change the comparison group. A proper investigation would not begin by insisting that one explanation must be true; it would test the alternatives.

The official UKRI data shows that the organisation has begun publishing diversity information about applicants and awardees, but the quality of any interpretation depends on disclosure and on the categories used. If ethnicity is unknown for a large share of candidates, the picture remains incomplete. If the data covers awardees but not the full applicant pool, claims about selection remain limited.

None of this excuses indifference. A university that sees very few Black students entering doctoral research should act while research continues. It can improve outreach, provide mentoring, widen supervisor networks and fund preparatory routes. It can also monitor whether interventions recruit candidates previously excluded or merely relabel existing activity. But I think it should not be a reason to lower academic standards, especially by manipulating entry criteria.

The same logic applies to admissions. Oxford’s rising BME intake shows change, but the aggregate number hides major differences between Asian, Black, mixed, and other groups. A policy that celebrates the total while ignoring the distribution may claim diversity while failing the students it was intended to reach. A policy that sets fixed group outcomes without considering applicant qualifications and course demand may create a different kind of unfairness.

There is no neutral escape from these choices. Every admissions system uses judgments. The question is whether the judgments are public, relevant, and contestable. “Diversity” cannot be allowed to function as a magic word that ends the argument. Nor should “merit” be treated as a complete explanation when merit is measured through opportunities that were not equally available. Both words require definitions and evidence.

The class-first challenge cannot be waved away

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was condemned by many campaigners for placing too much weight on culture, family structure and class. The criticism had force where those categories were used to minimise racism or to suggest that disadvantaged people were responsible for their own position. But dismissing the commission wholesale would be another form of ideological sorting. Its educational evidence contains a challenge that Arday’s argument must answer. Many of the members were from ethnic minorities. The chair, Dr Tony Sewell, is Black. And after the report was published, he had to endure ‘racism’ from the progressives who saw his conclusions as heretical. Progressives react very strongly when they see a black dealling in heretical ideas, even when they demonstrate great success in advancing the lives of marginalised inner-city children. An example of this is the treatment of Katherine Birbalsingh!

Black African pupils and Black Caribbean pupils do not always produce the same educational outcomes despite being placed under the same broad racial label. The commission linked some of that difference to migration history and what it called “newcomer optimism”: the belief among some recent immigrant families that education is an essential route to security and advancement. It also pointed to differences in family expectations, community structure, and settlement patterns.

These claims should not become stereotypes. No single Black African culture or Black Caribbean culture exists, and individual families vary widely. Nor does a group’s educational success prove that it has encountered no discrimination. But the variation is analytically important. If the aim is to improve outcomes, policymakers need to know whether the obstacle is classroom bias, poverty, family instability, neighbourhood disadvantage, expectations, school quality or a combination of those factors.

A class-first approach also prevents equality policy from becoming a competition between racial groups. The White British working class can experience educational failure, insecure work, poor housing and geographic exclusion. Women faced legal and social restrictions that differed from those faced by men, and full equal voting rights for women in Britain arrived only in 1928, a decade after universal male suffrage. Historical privilege is not distributed evenly inside the category “white”.

That does not erase racial advantage where it exists. It does challenge the lazy idea that every white person is equally privileged or that every Black person shares the same disadvantage. A policy aimed at deprived communities may help many Black families without turning assistance into a racial entitlement. In some cases, that approach is more politically durable because it addresses a visible material problem rather than demanding agreement with a contested theory of society.

The strongest reforms will combine both levels of analysis. They will investigate racial bias where evidence points to it while refusing to treat race as a substitute for class, geography or family conditions. They will disaggregate groups rather than celebrate aggregate totals. They will improve support for pupils and students without teaching them that their identity determines their prospects. And they will judge institutions by results rather than by the fluency of their statements.

What a serious university reform program would look like

Arday’s call for institutions to examine colonisation before announcing decolonisation contains a useful practical rule: establish the history and mechanism first. Universities should identify how a discipline developed, which sources shaped it, who was excluded, and whether that exclusion still affects present teaching or research. But the audit should be historical and empirical, not a ritual with a known answer.

The second rule is to separate curriculum improvement from epistemological submission. A literature list can include writers from a wider range of countries. A biology course can show clinical signs on different skin tones. A history course can teach colonial violence and resistance. A mathematics department can explain the contributions of non-European scholars without pretending that a theorem becomes more or less valid according to the identity of its author. Inclusion should make knowledge fuller, not make truth negotiable.

The third rule is to set an evidence trail. For every major intervention, the university should publish the problem it is addressing, the baseline data, the action taken, the cost, the responsible officer, the expected outcome, and the date of review. If the intervention is a curriculum change, examine student attainment and understanding. If it is a mentoring scheme, track progression rather than attendance. If it is an admissions initiative, report applicant and offer rates as well as final intake numbers.

The fourth rule is to protect disagreement. A staff member should be able to ask whether a racial disparity has been properly analysed without being treated as morally suspect. A student should be able to say that a new module is ideological without being accused of resisting equality. A scientist should be able to defend universal methods while acknowledging gaps in the evidence. Debate is not a delay to reform. It is the process that stops reform becoming a new orthodoxy.

The fifth rule is to pay for the work. If universities want staff and students to review curricula, organise forums, mentor colleagues and gather data, those activities should be resourced and recognised. The Race Equality Charter describes itself as a voluntary, evidence-based framework for institutional action, but any framework can become ceremonial if no one is accountable for its results. ⁸ The answer is not another badge. It is a budget, a timetable and a public record of what changed.

The final rule is political modesty. Universities should stop promising transformation when they have changed a reading list. They should stop implying that a seminar can repair centuries of history. They should stop asking minority academics to provide emotional credibility for policies they are not empowered to design or evaluate. They should stop describing critics as backward and supporters as enlightened.

That modesty would not weaken the case for reform. It would strengthen it. A university that admits what it knows, what it suspects and what it has not yet established is more trustworthy than one that turns uncertainty into moral certainty. The public can accept difficult facts when institutions do not pretend that every policy is above criticism.

The test is whether the work survives the slogan

Arday is right about the danger of the one-hit wonder. Institutional language can arrive with the energy of a political anthem and disappear when the next campaign begins. The result is not only wasted money. It is cynicism. Students learn that universities reward the correct vocabulary. Staff learn that the people who do the work may not receive the credit. The public learns to distrust declarations that cannot survive ordinary scrutiny.

He is also right that the post-Floyd period exposed how little permanent infrastructure many institutions had built. Universities that had no settled approach to racial inequality suddenly had to answer questions about their curriculum, their staff profile and their relationship with students. Some responded with serious work. Others reached for the quickest available language and treated publication speed as proof of commitment.

But the counterargument remains decisive. A serious problem does not validate every solution offered in its name. Evidence of unequal outcomes does not prove a single racial cause. A narrow medical curriculum does not make scientific truth subjective. Unpaid equality labour does not establish that the answer is more decolonisation. And the public’s retreat from a political issue does not prove that the public is morally deficient.

The universities now have a choice. They can keep adding fashionable labels to documents and asking staff to applaud the latest initiative. Or they can make a less attractive commitment: define the problem, collect the denominator, test the mechanism, count the costs, publish the failures and allow the argument to continue.

That approach would frustrate activists who want declarations, administrators who want settled language, and politicians who want a quick public signal. It would also produce better education. A university’s purpose is not to protect a framework from challenge. It is to teach people how to distinguish a fact from an interpretation, a disparity from a cause and a promise from a result.

Decolonisation may yet become a useful term if it is stripped of its magic. It must mean something specific in each discipline, and the meaning must be open to criticism. Where colonial history produced exclusion, institutions should document it. Where present practices produce unequal treatment, they should change them. Where the evidence is uncertain, universities should say so.

Anything less is not progress. It is the old politics of institutional fashion wearing a newer uniform.

References

1. BBC News, “Cambridge University’s Jason Arday becomes youngest black professor”, 23 February 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-64717079 ↩
2. Liverpool John Moores University, “Decolonising the Curriculum”. https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/microsites/decolonising-the-curriculum ↩
3. Leading Routes, “The Broken Pipeline Report”. https://www.leadingroutes.org/the-broken-pipeline-report ↩
4. University of Oxford, “More Black British students than ever choosing Oxford”, 7 January 2020. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-01-07-more-black-british-students-ever-choosing-oxford ↩
5. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, “Education and training”, GOV.UK, 31 March 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/education-and-training ↩
6. Cabinet Office, “Race Disparity Audit”, GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/race-disparity-audit ↩
7. Skin of colour: essentials for the non-dermatologist, Clinical Medicine, available through PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11046548 ↩
8. Advance HE, “The Updated Race Equality Charter”. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter ↩ ↩