Just two days after all three campuses staged events to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Critical Area Studies Collective gathered for the first time to express their outrage.
The hundreds of students and handful of professors in attendance believe that “institutionalized racism” is inherent in the school’s curricula.
At Friday’s conference, CASC called for profound changes in the ways subjects are taught and funded at U of T, urging for more emphasis on neglected areas and disciplines such as African and Carribean studies and non-Western philosophy.
“Stop talking about ‘Great Minds for a Great Future,'” said Arnold Itwaru, a professor of Caribbean studies. “Stop talking about higher learning and call it like it is: an institutionalized, racist university, the ‘School of European-American Studies.'”
“No one’s arguing that U of T won’t remain a mainly Eurocentric institution,” said Professor Sean Hawkins, of the African Studies Department. “But the problem is it’s so thoroughly Eurocentric right now. The whole set of paradigms used to teach here is Western.”
CASC pointed to the fact that, out of 47 professors in the philosophy department, only one focuses on non-Western philosophy. Out of 56 political science professors, only 9 have research interests outside of Europe and North America.
None of them focus on postcolonial political theory, a branch of thought that challenges Europe-grounded views of history and philosophy.
“This is not about tokenism,” said Preethy Sivakumar, one of CASC’s organizers. She stressed CASC is not seeking to have the university appoint professors from diverse global backgrounds, but rather to fundamentally broaden the university’s perspective on the world.
According to the group’s mission statement, “Diversity of people is absolutely important, but it is window-dressing if diversity is not existent within and throughout the institution. At an academic institution, this means within and throughout all courses, programs and disciplines.”
Sivakumar believes that the school is failing in its academic duties because it has allowed its curriculum and funding decisions to reflect greater global inequalities.
“I definitely think this is an issue of social justice…it is not an isolated issue,” Sivakumar said. “This problem of area studies is a problem of the world.”
The administration argues that non-Western areas of study receive less funding because students exhibit little interest in them, and enrolment is often so low that courses are cancelled. Noaman Ali of CASC called this as an unacceptable excuse.
“These programs are not promoted well. They’re put off in the backwater of New College where people don’t know they exist,” he said. “If you build it, they will come.”
CASC is advocating challenges to the curriculum, through both institutional and non-institutional means.
The group has called for widespread protest among the student body, suggesting dissent and “throwing pies in [the administration’s] face.”
Luke Melchiorre, an African Studies and Political Science graduate from U of T, is aware that there’s a certain irony in the fact that many of the views students are using to challenge the administration have been acquired from U of T itself.
“But that’s the nature of academia,” he said. “It’s always challenging itself.”
