Must the University Be Decolonised? Relating Academic and Social Justice

Political theorists, like many other academics in the humanities and social sciences, are deeply divided about how the choices we make regarding what material to teach and write about should be related to larger questions of social and political justice. Calls to “decolonize the university” suggest what I am calling “isomorphism” between the two spheres—that increasing justice in research and curriculum design should resemble or reflect successful movements toward justice outside the academy. The result would be that ideals of distributive justice, equality, and diversity that ought to govern the wider world should also determine the distribution of attention from scholars and their students. The opposite of isomorphism on this matter is “isolationism,” the view that universities and societies around them ought to be treated as autonomous spheres of justice in Michael Walzer’s sense, properly governed by entirely unrelated distributive principles and in need of protection from “invasion” by the principles that ought to govern elsewhere. This essay will attempt to defend a third position, which I am calling “instrumentalism,” opposed to both isolationism and isomorphism. The principles that ought to govern activity within the academy cannot be isolated from those that ought to govern the world around it because the academic sphere has been created and funded by surrounding societies to fulfill important social purposes. The best path to attaining these purposes, however, need not be governed by normative principles that resemble those governing the rest of society. A successful relationship of means to ends, after all, often precludes a relationship of analogy or resemblance. If Audre Lorde’s claim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is incorrect, then violating principles of equality or diversity in scholarship and curricular design might be the best way to advance these principles in the wider world. Even if Lorde is correct, I will argue that the new tools that academics design should be evaluated in terms of their instrumental effectiveness, and not in terms of their resemblance to what justice requires of us elsewhere.