What's up with UK academia?
Decolonisation, ideological balance, and the perils of 'co-creation' (Part 1)
I’m writing this as a Part 2 to my Ally Louks article from last month. (In time there will be a Part 3, featuring some testimonials from recent students and academics and a list of helpful further readings - I’m organising these now and still waiting for a few responses. If you’d like to submit something about your academic experience in the UK from 2020 on, please do).
I think the Louks phenomenon is totally over now - and I had even fewer regrets about writing my piece after I saw her doing some shameless ivory tower gatekeepery on Twitter. This served only to prove me right - people are sick of being treated like illiterate provincials for not being impressed by simplistic, overdone bits of theory about structural oppression. (I’m also sensing a creeping dislike for the ‘resident Twitter expert’ archetype, especially when it breaches the solid, content-knowledge territory of (eg.) menswear or architecture and enters into the nebulous world of critical theory. Opinions are not facts, and their failure to impress here is only natural).
I was overwhelmed by the reception to my first article, which I didn’t think would escape the containment zone of my own social circle. One assertion seemed to stick:
This resonated with quite a lot of you - but several people complained that I was pontificating without evidence. They had a point, and a very reasonable one! I spoke from personal experience and through anecdotes (I talk to other recent graduates and current academic staff whenever I can), but should have made a greater effort to back up my assertion. In this article, I’m going to try to isolate and explain the actual shift I’m talking about, with evidence from universities themselves and from people I’ve interviewed along the way.
My general thesis
since the late 2010s, and particularly within the past four years, a range of top-down institutional incentives have influenced the focus and subject matter of undergraduate humanities curricula across a large proportion of HE institutions in the UK. These incentives are not illegal - to legislate against them would be a formal attack on academic freedom - but they detract from larger cultures of free academic inquiry in explicitly reorienting course objectives towards the analysis of power, stratification, and social justice
these curriculum incentives are (often inappropriately, more later) conflated with the wider imperative to achieve demographic equality of academic outcome, so teaching staff who want to raise concerns about their educational impact may fear career-ruining accusations surrounding their own racial, disability and/or gender bias. This may eventually constitute a legal issue.
On canons
In this piece you’ll see quite a few real-life examples in which received scholarly canons are overthrown in the curriculum by their own criticism. This is debilitating - there are many good reasons for putting a primary text under critical fire, but students need to make sense of the natural evolution of their own field, gather information about place and time (‘content knowledge’), and have a chance to react to primary propositions under their own steam before they can meet critical traditions where they stand.
I think this comes from the conflation (again) of:
An End of History-esque worldview of progress and development, in which we gradually encroach on an ideal of human rights and liberal democracy (alienating to many at all levels of society, and ripe for academic criticism)
A pedagogical focus on chronology and canons (sensible, actually).
The basic point I’d like to make here is that canons are not inherently indicators of social progress. They imply a) reciprocal influence and b) cultural salience, both of which are useful to consider if you are navigating a field with lots of literature for the first time. This is true even if you use the least-charitable ‘dead white men’/‘Great Books’ interpretation of the canon (there are plenty of warring arguments in the much-criticised 1952 Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World collection). Canons form naturally. There is a canon specific to those who study West African Anglophone literature and another canon specific to those who study Japanese cinema. Both converge into the accepted ‘Western canon’ at several points.
Influential philosophers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel are likely to be embedded in more versions of the philosophy canon across place and time than philosophers who are not widely-read. So are Foucault and Butler - but this also means embedding Descartes, Kant and Hegel again, because the theories of Foucault and Butler were formulated in response to that group. (Thus you’d need to understand Descartes, Kant and Hegel to get the most out of a lot of current undergraduate courses, even if the general focus is on the criticism of structural oppression).
There is a level of democracy inherent to canon-making. Publishers choose to print and discontinue books, and teachers or education authorities decide to set them - but you decide to reference them in your own work and speech, and to pass copies down to your children. These are subjective choices, but their lines of influence become fact. This is quite obvious in film - you can look at the way 1970s feminist theorists managed to pull off a cultural elevation of 1950s melodrama directors, like Douglas Sirk, or at the relatively new near-household status of Wong Kar-wai, which was enabled among young filmgoers online. I’d argue that attempts to ‘decolonise the canon’ have already been successful in part - most people with even middlebrow engagement in English literature know names like Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and Chinua Achebe. They’ve been canonised.
The canon adapts over time to accommodate lasting debates, which means it naturally allows for a degree of transgression - adversaries and rebellions are canonised just by virtue of being adversaries and rebellions. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a signed urinal) is part of the canon of modern art. You’d be excited to see it in a museum, and most people with a surface-level education in conceptual art could tell you what it signifies. But it would be meaningless if you had no idea what his peers were doing or what art schools expected him to do.
I would like to argue for this historical model of the canon as a source of natural academic freedom. I don’t think we should get rid of postmodern scholars like Foucault and Butler, who have had an undeniable influence on scholarship in most humanities fields - but I want them to be taught as viable branches of an evolving tradition, not presented as the default lens through which to study sex and society. They should never represent the only school of criticism offered to students on a given module (if it’s a module on Foucault, there should still be criticism of Foucault) - and students should ideally get the chance to learn about the major thinkers they wrote in response to (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc) before being asked to formulate an opinion on their critical frameworks.
Particular issues with UK universities
Preparation
The majority of UK university students go straight from school into a chosen degree course, with no chance to take humanities-based ‘gen eds’ (in America, often sequential ‘survey courses’) that might provide transdisciplinary discernment. Many humanities courses can be accessed without their A-level equivalent. (For subjects mostly offered in private schools, like ancient languages, or subjects with no corresponding A-level, like anthropology, obvious problems arise). I've written on the issues with personal statements before - I think they're too American in that they rely on style, storytelling and ‘hooks,’ and require no actual evidence of sustained independent study (you can name-drop books and resources, but there’s no space to go into detail or develop your own thoughts). In an era where young people read less than at any point in living memory, I think this background leaves new university entrants particularly vulnerable to ideological capture and misrepresentation in the classroom.
Transparency
English universities are under no obligation to actually publish the learning objectives and reading lists on their modules (even compulsory ones), which can change at any time. This blocks undergraduate curricula from scrutiny by prospective students, as well as by academics from other institutions. If, by your final year, you think the compulsory part of your undergraduate course gave you an unbalanced introduction to your field, you can leave a complaint on the National Student Survey (as did I, along with several classmates). But it won’t be released for the benefit of others, as happens with quantitative data - only your university can read it, and nobody is there to make them act on or even address any of it.
In many humanities fields, the pedagogical practices I'm going to talk about necessitate huge changes to taught content and assessment, as well as a fundamental shift in the reasons why lecturers expect you to learn. As I'm about to outline, there are many legitimate reasons to disagree with ‘decolonisation’ and ‘justice pedagogy’ as implemented across UK universities, including from a left viewpoint. But there is usually no way to work out whether these practices are implemented on a given undergraduate course (and then in which areas of a given subject) at the point of application or enrolment. (At SOAS, it was sometimes impossible even during module sign-up). If your department decides to implement them halfway through your course (this is what happened to me), you're basically powerless - you can technically transfer to a different university, but that's difficult and unusual in the UK, and who's to say that institution won't do the same thing?
The student has been reframed as consumer, but it's a type of consumer with very little say in the product they pay for. The choice shouldn't always come down to the student - lecturers are (arguably) there because of their familiarity with a certain subject area - but you should at least be able to choose a department and course at the outset whose aims and philosophies broadly align with your own. And to trust that these aims and philosophies will generally stay the same over three years.
Money
If you’re a domestic undergraduate student at an English or Welsh university then you currently pay £9,250 per year for the privilege of tuition. Yes, for many this ends up being a sort of ‘graduate tax’ rather than a large one-off payment, and will only be paid back once you’re earning over a defined payment threshold - but if you’re dissatisfied with the education you got, this tax will probably still end up as a sore spot. (And it’ll collect interest!)
Most people only have a chance to get government-rate tuition and maintenance loans for one three-year undergraduate degree, with one extra ‘gift year’ provided (usually used if you drop and switch to another course after your first year). Unless you are very rich, you really only have one chance to do an undergraduate degree. (This is why it feels so tone-deaf to criticise students who are unhappy with theirs - and why you should be angry if you feel you’re being used as a guinea pig for curriculum reform).
On ‘decolonising the curriculum’ (DtC) and critical pedagogy
In my first essay, I declared that UK higher education had turned into ‘the study of structural oppression.’ This was a crude but admittedly quite effective way of talking about the HE-based mainstreaming of ideas from ‘critical pedagogy,’ a field developed from the late 1960s onwards and pioneered by the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire. Over the past few years, ‘decolonising the curriculum’ (DtC) initiatives appear to have been the most notable vehicle for critical-pedagogical practices in UK HE. DtC appears to have picked up considerable speed in the British academy from 2020 onwards (see stats below). This is likely because of a convergence between a) the killing of George Floyd and the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests that summer, b) the DtC-adjacent Rhodes Must Fall movement, which reached Oxford University in 2015 but became a hot topic in the press during that wave of BLM activism.
Thinkers within critical pedagogy approach academia itself in terms of structured power relations (thus ‘all education is political’). These power relations are contiguous with those in the outside world, which form along axes of race, gender, class, disability, and historical injustice. They are reinforced in the classroom by teaching and assessment practices, and also by what is taught. This is where ‘dead white men’ come in - a ‘culturally-sensitive’ curriculum would need to represent its students, who may not be white men. (Here is an explanation of the ‘hidden curriculum’ from the Centre for Innovation in Education at Liverpool University, with attention both to DtC movements and to early critical pedagogy).
‘Decolonisation’ is a sensitive, politically-loaded term, and should be handled on a case-by-case, contextual basis by individual academics. No interpretation should be imposed from above by librarians, Teaching and Learning researchers, or EDI teams (see evidence to the contrary below). I am worried that current forms of DtC are implemented in a way that stifles dissent from those who have legitimate concerns about their larger ideological, academic, and pedagogical effects.
A DfE report from February 2021 warned against exactly this:
The HEP [higher education provider] should not interfere with academic freedom by imposing, or seeking to impose, a political or ideological viewpoint upon the teaching, research or other activities of individual academics, either across the whole HEP or at department, faculty or other level. For example, a head of faculty should not force or pressure academics to teach from a their own ideological viewpoint, or to only use set texts that comply with their own viewpoint. This applies equally to contested political ideologies that are not associated with a particular political party or view, such as ‘decolonising the curriculum’.
A not-so-brief audit of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ (DtC) schemes and resources at UK universities, with case studies from SOAS, York St. John, and Durham
Summary:
Out of 145 universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, I found evidence that 91 (about 62%) have publicly professed an attachment to the practice of ‘decolonising the curriculum.’ This Guardian article from 2020 used FOIs rather than published information, but it found that only 24 of 124 respondents were ‘committed to decolonising their curriculums.’ I don’t know which universities the Guardian asked, and I didn’t have time to wait for FOIs (it was Christmas break for university staff) so I couldn’t replicate the experiment exactly. My result must be slightly mismatched, but it should demonstrate an increase in enthusiasm for DtC measures among UK university admin.
In this process, I counted: pledges/stated priorities for DtC within officially-available EDI strategies, hosting of DtC guidance in a space reserved for official information on the university’s website (usually EDI or Teaching and Learning), and the use of DtC ‘libguides,’ created and hosted by that university’s library.
I did not count: blog posts by individual academics, SU campaigns (typically proof that little or no action has been taken), CPD courses advertised to staff from outside providers, and pieces of individual research hosted on university Pure systems, if they did not evidence decolonising practices at the institution.
At six of the universities I didn’t count within the first criteria, at least one individual academic department publicly pledged to carry out DtC measures.
On university websites, DtC schemes were often grouped with institutional EDI initiatives. Many resources identify DtC projects as a means to close ‘awarding gaps’ (ie. gaps in module marks, which then become final degree classification) between BAME and white students.
This explains some of the ideological blindness on display here (eg. at York St. John, below) - universities don’t see DtC as a project purely rooted in academic theory. There is little room for pushback and criticism of the ideas themselves, because the schemes are treated as part of larger EDI strategies.
This is despite a lack of evidence that DtC initiatives actually help to close race-based awarding gaps.
Among the universities who published DtC resources, there is a resounding trend for ‘co-creation,’ which is considered a necessary part of decolonising HE - many institutions are expected to look to students when restructuring curricula. However, where this happens, it tends to be through the work of a very small number of paid, pre-selected ‘co-creator interns,’ rather than surveys of the entire student population on a given course.
You can access a version of the spreadsheet I used here (although please note the date and citation fields are intended for personal use and currently incomplete). This bit of research was simply intended to gauge the scale of DtC initiatives in UK HE - the scope and direction at each individual institution varies.
SOAS
Author’s note: I went to SOAS, but I’m looking into its DtC resources here for reasons other than that. I have put in an FOI request about the circumstances surrounding my specific course and the specific modules that were removed and made compulsory - I’d love to report back, but don’t think they’ll be able to share much. I did a bit of press work about it over the summer which is still floating around unpublished, and only got evasive responses from staff involved.
SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, in central London), has a background as a training centre for colonial administrators and a specialist reputation for the study of Asia and Africa, so it makes sense that it became a forerunner in British DtC. The university’s 2018 ‘Decolonising SOAS: Learning and Teaching Toolkit for Programme and Module Convenors’ is an early and influential resource with significant amounts of theoretical background. It has been cited in DtC resources hosted by universities including Liverpool John Moores, Bedfordshire, Hull, and York St. John. A 2024 subject-specific follow-up, ‘Decolonising Philosophy: A Toolkit,’ provides a very concerning model of curriculum reform in practice. You can find the documents here (2018) and here (2024).
I recommend reading through the 2018 toolkit: it is broadly reasonable. Terms and prior assumptions are almost always defined from a base of zero, with some attention given to issues of academic freedom. The writers account for historicist concerns - they take pains to say that academics might ‘choose to include… or leave out… traditions of knowledge in a particular field,’ but they make the caveat that these decisions may a) ‘centre or normalise constructions of ‘Westernness’ or ‘whiteness’ as basic reference points for human society,’ b) create ‘a very significant presence for scholars racialised as white, gendered as male, and located…within a limited range of Western institutions or canons’ (p. 8).
As with almost every resource I have seen so far, its purported goal is to ‘promote awareness and reflection about forms of racialised disadvantage that can be potentially mitigated through revising approaches to curriculum and pedagogy.’ (p.21, emphasis mine). There are huge holes left if you think about them - like the fact that there is actually no proof of curriculum changes solving racial gaps in attainment - but due to all its careful caveat-ing, I think it actually reaches its aim.
I cannot say this for the 2024 toolkit, which should never have been published. It is a car crash of a DtC resource - an exhibition of the movement at its very worst.
It’s published as an official resource on the university’s official website, but the authors are four undergraduate interns and four academics (you’ll find this is a common trend). We start off super strong, ie. by making a huge claim about ‘much academic philosophy’ in huge swathes of the world with absolutely zero evidence, not even a single example, and then chiding ‘dangerously simplistic manners’ of representation mere paragraphs later (figs 1-2).
Rather than the careful bit about ‘awareness and reflection,’ the authors conclude a theory-heavy section on ‘The Coloniality of Power’ by saying ‘for a decolonising philosophy curriculum to yield transformative results, each individual must actively embrace challenging coloniality’ (p. 5). Although there are many cogent criticisms of it from the left, Robin diAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ thesis is treated as immovable fact to strengthen a thesis about classroom racialisation, and her detractors are strawmanned as people who are unconscious of racism beyond ‘white hoods and burning crosses’ (p. 6, note the invocation of the distinctly-American Klu Klux Klan).
The authors provide a sample from the syllabus of a philosophy module ‘currently taught at SOAS’ (it’s not clear which one) - here, students exist as part of ‘categories’ of ‘privilege’ which shape their views. The less-privileged are granted access to certain unique insights, with the right (and right not) to ‘educate others’ (p. 8). (This is exactly what I meant when I said ‘2014 Tumblr politics’).
In the section on decolonising assessment, the authors include a chart of ideal ‘dimensions’ along which to do so. The chart was originally designed by ‘Lambert et al. 2023’ - but there is no reference section in the document with titles or publication names (!). They are most likely referring to this paper, Lambert et al. 2022.1 The original chart is below:
(‘Deficit discourse’ = predicating the educational process on a perceived lack of student knowledge or skill)
I was disquieted by the ‘justice-as-pedagogy’ section, because there is a clear contrast between its two aims: you cannot set students up to ‘critically engage, reflect on, and challenge’ material while seeking specifically to ‘teach’ a certain idea, or to ‘apply’ a certain idea (note which ideas, specifically) to new things. If students decide to stray from the idea of ‘decolonisation’ as a central pillar of social justice - if, for example, they refuse to ‘apply’ it to ‘new experiences and contexts,’ and decide instead to write a book called Against Decolonisation - do you still consider yourself a successful pedagogue?
The most offputting part of the document is its only concrete example of what the authors think ‘decolonising the philosophy curriculum’ should look like. This is a ‘traditional-cum-colonial epistemology module’ (pp. 23-25):
This module is inadequate. It is ‘eurocentric,’ and ‘overlooks the limitations of the dominant western theories of truth such as the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories’ (although it is never explained what these limitations are) (p. 25). Its geographic bias ‘blinds students to theories of truth emerging from global contexts,’ including traditional Indian philosophy and the kingdom of Benin - ‘its focus on Anglo-European accounts alone gives a skewed global impression of hegemony’ (p. 25).
Do not fear! The authors have fixed this imaginary module.
Instead of establishing a basic definition of ‘epistemology,’ or looking at a primary text with a lot of assenting or dissenting responses, we begin by talking about ‘decolonising’ epistemologies, and the ‘epistemology of coloniality:’
Then we move onto the proper stuff. Texts from distinct traditions are jammed together - we don’t get a picture of the call-and-response ‘activity’ of philosophy, and this does a disservice to some of the thinkers included. Confucius’ Analects come up in ‘Moral Epistemology’ next to Theories of Error in Indian Philosophy. But if you just read the Analects and nothing else, you risk marginalising Chinese thought as a collection of koans, commandments and aphorisms, which is a lot more ‘orientalist’ than not including it at all - you won’t get any idea of the interplay and argument between thinkers in dynastic China.2 (Ever heard of the Hundred Schools of Thought - or of Liu Bang, who hated Confucius and famously urinated in the hats of his followers?)
Something is amiss here: I fail to understand how a thorough project of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ can lead to this treatment of ‘indigenous ways of knowing and being.’ There are thousands of linguistically-distinct ‘indigenous’ groups in the world, and they’re clearly being used here to prove a larger point about the landscape of mainstream philosophy, rather than to exploit an actual intellectual curiosity about the way their members see the world. (Do they not get to have their own traditions of ‘moral epistemology’ or ‘religious epistemology’)?
I know how I would truly ‘decolonise’ a philosophy practice - it would involve actually learning Sanskrit, Pali or Classical Chinese and getting to grips with a different tradition from the beginning, rather than in tokenised snippets. But this would cost actual money. (Conveniently, all the Friere stuff appears to be particularly cheap to implement - no actual staff specialisation required. And you can replace some of the qualified academics you’d need in the process with undergraduate interns, who’ll be glad to earn a bit of money on the side).
York St. John
York St. John University is a post-92 university, and began life as a teacher training college. The ‘Learning and Teaching’ section of the official York St. John website is home to the biggest DtC reading list I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, this list provides excellent evidence of DtC as a institutionally-sanctioned vehicle for the uncritical promotion of highly partisan ideologies, many of which have faced rebuttal from parts of the political left as well as the right.
A ‘Questions and Prompts’ list downloaded from the university’s official website takes political consciousness and outside activism for granted as learning objectives:
The reading list is split into several parts. Fig. 14 is all of ‘Long history of Palestine and Empire’ - other books on Palestine in the list tell the same story:
Policing and prisons are represented entirely through the lens of the pro-abolition movement, even though there are many reasonable holes in and objections to it (nobody has successfully come up with a solution re. violent and sex offences):
Within the ‘anti-racism and the university’ section, there is no divergence from the idea that HE ought to aim (variously) for ‘scholar-activism,’ ‘scholarly transformation,’ and ‘education in a struggle for change:’
The section on racism never diverges from ideas within mainstream ‘Critical Race Theory’ - the only book included whose premise addresses ‘class-first politics,’ Fractured by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, settles into a sort of hybrid, where race and gender ‘categories are inseparable from the history of class struggle.’
I agree with some of the views represented and still find this chilling; a ‘Teaching and Learning Enhancement’ team should not be in charge of recommending partisan history and theory texts to the practitioners and students they serve. I would like to point out that this resource would have been perfectly fine if presented by an individual academic or group of academics, and if published in a way that disassociated from the institution at large. Most universities have their own blogs, with space to credit an individual author and to signify a general diversity of viewpoints - I didn’t count DtC resources presented in this way as evidence of any larger institutional aim. This is gross overreach, and will only marginalise staff and students who have legitimate issues with the material presented.
Durham (co-created resource):
Figures 19 and 20 are both taken from Durham’s English Literature ‘Decolonising the Curriculum Toolkit.’ The toolkit is a ‘co-created’ resource, hosted publicly on the university’s official website but assembled by paid student interns. I have several issues and questions here:
If you are specifically ‘teaching to learning outcomes that address power and social justice,’ does this mean you’re mandating a specific range of conclusions from the lectures, texts and questions you set? And if these ‘learning outcomes’ exist on graded compulsory modules, are you creating a situation of compelled speech for students?
A petty question - but if a student ‘addresses power and social justice,’ completes all of the readings that are set on the new, decolonised module, and still, somehow, finds a way to argue for epistemological constants across societies, or against a Critical Whiteness Studies reading of Austen or the Brontes, as indicated in fig. 19 - can they still get a First? Why or why not?
What’s ‘decolonial’ about diversified assessment? Of course there are verbal traditions, but a wide range of non-Western precolonial societies had written canons too, and many citizens and diaspora of colonised countries have found solace, empowerment, and self-articulation in the English-language novel (Rushdie, Achebe, etc.). Surely a) it’s actually more racist to lay a claim to the essay as the medium of the first-world coloniser, b) if you can read and understand a whole novel for adults, as an English degree would necessitate, you can also learn to put down about a fiftieth of its length in the form of an essay?
(Perhaps zines and presentations are easier to mark?)
For ‘diverse language use,’ the student interns seem to have clumsily switched the original ‘interactions, writings, and tests’ for ‘books not just written in English.’ If you are teaching on an English Literature degree and encourage dissertations on ‘books not just written in English,’ and expect to read an informed opinion at the end, you have to make sure your students are familiar with the background of languages and literatures that are not English. This is certainly possible, but somewhat oversteps the bounds of a specialist English faculty and English curriculum. (Also, you should hire better student interns).
Given a collective emphasis on ‘co-creation’ by students and undergraduates I think it's important that recent graduates push back - and do so publicly - if they don't think these reforms have served them well. My university is the national decolonisation capital, and I still think the changes made to my course were both detrimental in breadth and presumptuous about what its specific body of students wanted from their education. SOAS hire ‘co-creation interns’ every year, but scores on the NSS statement ‘Staff value students’ views and opinions about the course’ remain relatively low for my department - they currently sit at 62% for BA East Asian Studies as a whole. This trend is happening in part because staff are under the illusion that students are terribly invested in it - if something similar has happened to you, you should speak out.
Today’s Mandarin pop recommendation is the best song in my library and also definitely the most suggestive - Love Slave (爱的奴隶) by Candy Shu (Jin Yan 金燕). It came out in a high period of Taiwanese censorship but the subtext is exactly what you’re thinking. It’s a surf-rock cover of this Japanese song, released in 1968 by Chiyo Okumura (奥村チヨ).
Lambert, S., Funk, J. and Adam, T., 2022. What Can Decolonisation of Curriculum Tell Us About Inclusive Assessment?. In Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education (pp. 52-62). Routledge.
I would like to recommend the Routledge History of Chinese Philosophy (edited by Bo Mou, with a good essay on the Analects by Edward Slingerland) and also A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China.
As a molecular biologist who has wandered into this Substack, I'm just horrified by that "Epistemology of Science" section. Like, if somebody had a week to learn about the Russian Orthodox Church, you wouldn't give that person three readings on the Hare Krishna movement and one on Tibetan Buddhism. Even if you think those are better religions, they are just not relevant to the subject at hand.
I've read or done science for a large fraction of the waking hours of my adult life. The influence of "indigenous knowledge systems" in most areas of science is precisely nil. Every now and then in organismal biology you see some peripheral tidbit. Stephen Jay Gould has a nice essay on how species classifications by biologists frequently overlap those of indigenous people, showing that the academic classifications are not arbitrary, but we're really talking about ~0.01% of scientific thinking here. So in "Epistemology of Science" they teach three readings on indigenous knowledge systems and one on feminism? Is there something I'm missing here? How can anyone justify this?
Funny story: it was the Fresher's Fair weekend at the start of the academic year and I was walking around Oxford, every so often hearing about a decolonisation history tour, or a society to decolonise this or that, or someone advertising a decolonisation march -- and it was an American accent, every single time. I am forced to accept that literally Tumblr is the transmission vector for these things in British academic culture.
I was having a conversation about this with a sinologist at my college last term (he was previously at SOAS and repeated to me essentially all of your complaints, from the perspective of faculty!) and we agreed that the solution is
-become billionaire and then be an activist donor with philanthropy conditional on rigorous maintenance of standards
-until then, vigorously quote Dead White Men at graduate seminars, and namedrop Martha Nussbaum (https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody) whenever someone namedrops Judith Butler