“You have a colonial institution that, you know, has, arguably, coloniality still embedded within this institution. And then it’s the 100th year [since SOAS’ founding]. You have students saying, ‘Well look, we need to critically assess the history and not let it be some celebrations.’” Mohamed Zain-Dada (Co-President of Activities and Events, SOAS Student Union, 2015/16), in a video published in December 2016.

When I first met Sarah in real life, whose name has been changed to preserve her anonymity, it was at a café close to the Vernon Square campus of SOAS, where she offered to take me on a brief tour over the course of the day as I visited the campus. Whilst the physical visit never materialised, the conversation that played out allowed me to gain some unique insight into the ongoing campaign for curriculum decolonisation. Sarah was not a part of the official student movement, but felt strongly about defending its reputation against what they perceived to be “unrepresentative attacks made by media outlets”. Her close ties to the participants in an ongoing social and academic movement that has attracted supporters and critics from across the globe give her valuable insight into the nature of its demands.

Students at the London School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) have sought to lobby for an active ‘decolonisation’ of their institution. ‘Curriculum decolonisation’, applied within an academic or intellectual context, has been defined by a SOAS scholar as challenging the “huge debt and a body of knowledge which has reinforced the assumptions, experiences and limitations of past generations of scholarship” in the context of university education; by a professor working in Rhodes University as “[…] introducing well theorised scholarship emerging from, and underpinning by, the African local experience.”. They have attracted criticism from academics and university administrators including Sir Roger Scruton and Sir Anthony Sheldon, and been rejected as “ridiculous” by the head of the SOAS Religion and Philosophies department.

Sarah said it was about “calling out the Whiteness of the epistemic lenses of British universities”, and that “the system needed some shaking”. Decolonising the curriculum – as a concept – appears to be a contested and innately political idea, for which the ability to define and control its purpose and essence is instrumental in locating its relevance in the ongoing movement under the SOAS Student Union. The Union has aggressively lashed out at media coverage it describes as a “gross misrepresentation,” in a statement from January 9 that called for examining the representation of minority thinkers, increasing the number of BME faculty and cutting fees for students who had been “affected by class, racial and gender inequalities.”

The movement has published a list of its objectives on its official webpage, found here, as follows:

1. To hold events that will engage in a wider discussion about expressions of racial and economic inequality at the university, ocusing on SOAS.
2. To address histories of erasure prevalent in the curriculum with a particular focus on SOAS’ colonial origins and present alternative ways of knowing.  
3. To interrogate SOAS’ self-image as progressive and diverse.
4. To use the centenary year as a point of intervention to discuss how the university must move forward and demand that we, as students of colour, are involved in the curriculum review process.
5.  To review 10 first year courses, working with academics to discuss points of revamp, reform and in some cases overhaul.  
6. To make sure that the majority of the philosophers on our courses are from the Global South or it’s [sic] diaspora. SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora).
7. If white philosophers are required, then to teach their work from a critical standpoint. For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so called “Enlightenment” philosophers wrote within.

In particular, students have focused on campaigning for significant expansion in content within the BA World Philosophies course. Hawthorne affirms the views of the students, by noting that, “BA World Philosophies at SOAS is a unique programme that has been developed to promote philosophical dialogue between ‘East’ and ‘West’”. An initial examination of the course structure appears to show a wide range of existing modules available to students incorporating non-Western philosophy – the Year 1 outline mandates that students study two out of five options in ‘Traditions of Philosophy’ (featuring ‘Buddhism’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, and ‘Religions of East and Central Asia’).

At the suggestion that such options were adequate, Sarah laughed with a conspicuous tint of irony. According to her, the problematic features of the Status Quo pertained more to the implicit tendencies of course outlines and lectures to favour discussing Western philosophers as the basis of exploring the more general categories of philosophical study – e.g. the ‘Comparative Ethics’ and ‘Philosophies of Language’ components of Year 2.

Whilst the SOAS curriculum appeared to be diverse and inclusive, the practical divergences in teaching methodologies across courses meant from her perspective that students often struggled to comprehend the works of ‘non-conventional’ philosophers rarely taught and with publications scarce and few in the library. The SOAS union reiterated this perspective in its January 9 statement, emphasizing that the goal was for thinkers across sociocultural spectrum “to be studied in their appropriate contexts and for our curricula to encompass perspectives which reflect the diversity of the world we live in.”

More generally, students have also called for the prioritisation of marginalised philosophies in the Global South, and the situating of white philosophers from the Enlightenment Era within a ‘critical standpoint’ that highlights the colonial backgrounds of their works. Leaders of the movement cite the underrepresentation of non-European thinkers and the contributions of Oriental and African philosophies within European intellectual history as the primary justification for systemic reforms.  Commentators have suggested that the works of Immanuel Kant may perhaps be taught with a greater emphasis upon its underlying connections to conceptions and visions of race reflective upon Kant’s times and within Kant’s works. It was exactly this kind of proposal that raised the ire of some of the proposal’s critics, however.

““If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it,” Sutton said in his comments to the Telegraph.

Alternatively, the philosophical contributions of Enlightenment philosophers may also be recast in light of their involvement with colonialism – in both the actual (as per endorsing or providing the ideological basis for it) and ideological senses. Dr. Meera Sabaratnam adds that, “If we think that there is some kind of a relationship between position and perspective on an issue […] we need to diversify the sources we engage in our scholarship.”

The movement for intellectual decolonisation appears to be located within a wider wave of anti-colonial resistance embedded within the SOAS student consciousness. In the video released by the Student Union, Zain-Dada remarks that, “[…] you have a very particular type of student politics aimed towards a very particular type of students […] but a lot of the direct action and protests seem to be done by the white students.” It is hoped that with a greater range of intellectual ideals and ideas incorporated into the regular academic dialogue, SOAS could become a more socially inclusive and cohesive institution in which philosophical concepts from all around the world are given their fear hearing – independent of their geographical origins.

There is not, however, universal consensus in SOAS that the union’s demands as formulated are worth pursuing. Harper is a friend of Sarah’s that I came across in the very same café. Harper, unlike Sarah, finds the ongoing campaign “redundant” and “couched in unnecessarily politicised terms”. Whilst the underrepresentation of non-Western philosophers is an empirically verifiable stance, Harper noted, it is unclear to them why the deprioritisation of individuals who “simply have added less to academic philosophy” ought to be stigmatised and rejected. Harper further added that they found the politicisation of the curriculum by the Student Left a “bizarre” and “redundant” move.

The movement so far appears to have generated moderate traction amongst the teaching staff, with senior figures such as Dr. Deborah Johnston (Pro-Director (Learning and Teaching)) affirming the importance of the protests as promoting “informed and critical debate and discussion about the curriculum we teach”. Harper has expressed that whilst they were ambivalent as to the ultimate objectives of the ongoing campaign, they were “glad” that the movement has “opened up a new space for productive dialogue and discourse about an often neglected but important component of the SOAS identity”. The more curious observation, as noted by Harper, is that it appears that the movement has yet to pick up substantial traction within the student populace.

The movement itself has been subject to polarised and mixed reactions, with criticisms that it has participated in the “rekindling of racial politics” and “keeping with a poisonous new identity politics grabbing hold of campus radicals and the left more broadly”. Alternatively, more positive reception has been found in those who praised the movement for highlighting much-needed pedagogical and academic inadequacies in an institution that is traditionally renowned for its expertise in engaging with African and Oriental studies. Some SOAS faculty have celebrated the movement’s capacity to spark dialogue that transcends limited cultural perspectives. Prof. Sian Hawthorne (one of the two Convenors of the BA World Philosophies course) responded to the public backlash by observing that, “[…] decolonisation is fundamentally about the practice of dialogue; it is […a…] working towards what Hans-Georg Gadamer called ‘the fusion of horizons’ by which understanding across boundaries becomes possible.”

Curriculum decolonisation is a multi-faceted, complex, and contentious issue that has provoked vigorous reactions (both positive and negative) from both sides of the de-colonisation debate. Even as sympathetic articles cropped up in national newspapers, contemporaneous editorial coverage advanced the characterization of student activists as immature, coddled and unready for the adult world.

Whilst complete removal of Western philosophers from the SOAS curriculum appears to be neither the expressed wishes of the movement nor a realistic outcome, the ongoing discussion at SOAS may prove to be a pivotal watershed moment for future critiques of the intersection between higher education and social justice. Whether or not these activists merit the label “Special Snowflakes”, or are the precursors to a progressive reform in the curriculum of SOAS – remains to be seen.

*Names have been anonymised for the sake of privacy and confidentiality.

One term into a graduate programme at Oxford, I don’t know if I’ll ever run out of green meadows to stumble upon or intellectual resources to explore. But Insta-perfect libraries and a #1 World Ranking mask too-little discussed truths about this place: the financial burden of a social life here is unacceptable. Colleges and departments are failing to accommodate the perspectives they invite in. Students are hurting, yet they have little way to voice it here.

In sustaining such exclusivity, Oxford is perpetuating the prejudices currently miring the UK, US, and beyond. It is time this entire campus community make a deliberate effort to recognise the quiet struggles of so many here, to reflect on how we can alleviate them, and to come to grips with what a failure to do so implies for our larger global community. It is time we force Oxford to change.

From the baptism into pub-ism and, for the first time, experiencing problems like having to choose between a lecture with a prime minister or a debate with parliamentarians, the first few weeks here were bliss. The Rad Cam, Port Meadow, the rivers, the little boats that live on them: you can’t dream this charm. But my fellow grad students—inspiring, excited and grateful to be here, insanely diverse—won, hands down.

hands down. Nothing gave me more optimism for the coming years than listing all the different countries from which I was meeting people. The genuineness I sensed in many. This is exactly why I came here. But as I came out of the post-Freshers’ fog and the rhythm of the place started to emerge, I began having doubts about whether that harmonious melting pot would hold up.

Three weeks in, the diversity of the crowd at college events had withered. At my building’s first fire drill, I realized I had never even seen half the people who lived there. I repeatedly heard about the glass wall existing here between East Asian students and everyone else—and I heard of no one doing anything about it. In class discussions, I watched intellectual challenges be taken as personal attacks. I sensed people holding their tongues.

And as I began talking about some of these observations with others, I realized I wasn’t alone in making them. I began wondering why.

In doing so, what initially struck me as fun tradition, confidence, or high expectations on the part of the University began to look a lot more like ignorance, insensitivity, and more than anything, a missed opportunity to create an inclusive, empathetic environment.

Most of this, it seemed, manifested in college.

Many college-sponsored freshers’ events involved alcohol. The cultural divisions may have cemented from the start.

A new acquaintance told me that, in her college housing, pyjamas were not to be worn in e common room. At a college-sponsored workshop on formal dress, a student asked whether he could wear his tuxedo in place of a black suit without a stripe on the pants, under his robes, as sub-fusc. He hoped to avoid purchasing another suit. “Well,” the administrator responded. “I suppose… but I’ve never seen that before.”

A student who showed up to my college’s photo without a jacket was subject to embarrassment, in front of dozens.

The assumptions this borderline aggressive attitude toward dress makes about a student’s financial situation have no borders at this university, which sits on a £4+ billion endowment. College dinners are expensive. “You can’t even enter the dining hall at lunchtime unless you buy your own,” a friend pointed out. “Even the mindfulness class my college is holding this term costs money!”

Said a student in my department, “You pay $26,000 just to get here. And then you have to pay for everything.” Nearly everyone in her course is attending the Trinity Ball, which costs £200. Pocket change. She’d rather go back and see her family in the US (and perhaps save some money in the process.)

Unfortunately, not even the classroom is exempt from callousness. A friend of mine, who speaks English as a second language, had asked his professor during a lecture if they wouldn’t mind defining complex terms as they went along. He was having a hard time following the logic without them doing so. The professor suggested a dictionary and continued.

A non-white political science grad student pointed out that nearly every text assigned in his course thus far was written by a white person. His professors, he says, have been unreceptive to his criticism of the syllabus and he has thus taken it upon himself to bring an alternative perspective to class discussions. When asked if he’d recommend the program to others, he’s on the fence. In any case, he would warn them about this.

In both cases, the dismissiveness is disturbing. Most concerning, though, is the lack of institutionalised space for voicing these hardships, let alone for working to anticipate and avoid them.

In contrast to the many of them in my undergrad institution’s orientation program, neither my college, my course, nor those of any other graduate students I’ve spoken with, held mandatory workshops aimed at cultural or socioeconomic diversity awareness for graduate students. (There were several well-publicised, optional events around gender diversity, and I commend that.)

From what I’ve observed, when diversity discussions have taken place, advertisements for them have been relegated to the depths of weekly bulletins or list-servs most don’t receive. Ads do not only get people to the talks. They reflect what the university believes is important. They indicate what Oxford thinks we should care about.

If colleges and departments are to foster meaningful growth and relationships, they need to accommodate all different backgrounds—ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic included. What I’ve so far seen as a graduate student suggests there remains much to be done.

Despite all of this, there have been some encouraging signs. In my meeting with my college’s new master—she’s taking the time to sit down and learn from all new students—I shared many of these concerns with her. She seemed both genuinely disappointed by much of it and determined to get to work.

In Seventh Week, she helped organise a black and minority ethnic (BME) student discussion (in which I took part), aimed at understanding these groups’ expectations coming in and how they held up to experiences so far. It was a good conversation involving students, masters from three colleges, and a diversity officer.

But whether the proceedings from this meeting will translate into action remains to be seen. Moreover, some feel skeptical, even marginalised, by this top-down, researchdriven model of change, to begin with.

Said one individual who took part in a BME discussion, “It is frustrating to see the administration using students of colors’ experiences as data, but not treating us as creative individuals with ideas for responding to our experiences. Students have been voicing their experiences and strategies through activism like Rhodes Must Fall, but the focus groups seem to try to bypass that.”

When I started writing this piece, I felt the need to qualify it. These critiques might be nitpicky. Maybe I haven’t been here long enough.

Maybe the perfection of so much of this place makes the trivialities stand out. But, in surveying others, that’s fallen away. These are not trivialities. One term in, it’s clear that Oxford can do better. And I believe it has to.

The year 2016 made its message loud and clear. Our world is as globalised as ever, but that mixing of people has little bearing on how diverse crowds get along with each other. And as enlightened as we might think ourselves to be in this respect, we, the Oxford community, may not be all that different. In these times, how Oxford chooses to address issues of community will be a reflection of how it morally situates itself relative to the rest of the world.

The other side of that humility is just as urgent. History has it that many future global aders—be them political, academic, artistic— will come from this place. Here, they will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to network, and they will learn lessons about respect, acceptance, and the value of difference from those who instruct and evaluate them. If we fail to capitalise on these opportunities here, we’re not doing our ailing world a favor.

In contrast to what our various administrations seem to assume, continuing to say how diverse this place is does not mean students will be automatically be harmonious with, or understand, each other. Owning three suits and having thousands of dollars of disposable income for social activities is just not reality for many.

Not all students enjoy alcohol, or being around those consuming it. Simply because they proved themselves worthy of admission, students with weaker English can’t just Google how to compete, without working twice as hard as everyone else. And the perspectives of old, white men are not the only ones that matter.

Unravelling these assumptions will not only be an administrative project. The fact is, Admissions has done a spectacular job of crafting a global graduate demographic, and much of the effort to transform that demographic into community will need to come from the the demographic itself. Us.

A growth in our collective consciousness of the diverse opinions, needs, and concepts of home that come along with an international student body, is, perhaps more than anything, what is needed. Yet at the same time, the structures that organise us exert profound influence on that consciousness. The University, colleges, and departments need to create far more space for the reflection and demands that will achieve a culture of inclusivity.

Let’s start by vastly increasing public discussion on the Oxford experience. Colleges should hold mandatory diversity workshops at the start of each year for new graduate students, administrators, and faculty, alike, and all three groups should take part meaningfully in the workshops’ design. (Whether new or old, everyone should have to participate at least once.)

As students, let’s supplement those with alcohol-free open mic nights, giving those the opportunity to express, however they see fit, the feelings with which they’ve no doubt Skyped home, filled journals, and written songs.

Last November’s incredible ‘Love Rally’—attended by hundreds outside of the Clarendon building—can be our model. Though the event aimed at fostering post- US election unity, by amplifying an attitude of respect, inclusion, and acceptance, from the center of campus, went far beyond that.

But most importantly, let’s act on the truths that come out of this. What sort of community do we want to have here? How is the University fostering or obstructing it? If graduate students aren’t getting to know each other, what are we missing out on? What is the world missing out on? When it comes to community, I hope 2017 brings deliberacy.