For instance, in 2021, Minister of State for Universities Michelle Donelan called the decolonising of the curriculum a “censoring of history”. Equally, efforts to decolonize the university have made national news and found critics at the highest level of government. Meanwhile, many institutions have now adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism, which it equates with criticism of Israel and its policies.Īlliance-related censuring of Palestinian academics has been rampant in the United Kingdom as well. DeSantis has committed to “removing all woke positions and ideologies” from the curriculum. Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee are among those that have already imposed bans and restrictions.įlorida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office has celebrated his state’s anti-critical race theory legislation as a rejection of “the progressivist higher education indoctrination agenda”. There have been legislative efforts in a majority of US states to effectively ban conversations on racism and white privilege from the classroom. But while President Joe Biden’s administration overturned the directive, the so-called culture wars have continued. Institutions like the University of Iowa and John A Logan College in Illinois put diversity-focused initiatives and events on hold. “It was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place,” Trump said at the time. During his presidency, Donald Trump instructed all federal agencies to “cease and desist” anti-bias training focused on racism and white privilege. A wider attackĬritical race theory, for instance, has been in the eye of the storm in the United States. In such a model of higher education, morally and ethically grounded issues such as Palestinian rights do not seem to have a place. It is part of a wider attack on progressive thought and scholarship on campuses across the world.įrom being places of knowledge generation for the betterment of society, universities have been refashioned into service providers of skills and qualifications for the labour market. ![]() While Roth’s case made headlines around the world, it is just one example of how the weaponisation of the charge of anti-Semitism has been used to censure Israel’s critics at universities across the West.īut the treatment of Roth illustrates an even deeper malaise in the way higher education institutions are increasingly defining their mandate. ![]() ![]() Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy school, had vetoed his fellowship, expressing concern over Roth’s “anti-Israel bias” as well as his tweets criticising Israel. In early January, news broke that Kenneth Roth, the former boss of Human Rights Watch, had been denied a fellowship by Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government due to the organisation’s criticism of Israel under his leadership.
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