Decolonize and Diversify UvA!!!

“If colonialism was a body, University would be its brain”. Max de Ploeg, one of the leaders of DNU (De Nieuwe Universiteit).

As a university student, I constantly encounter extended research and articles on different subjects. However, I started noticing recently that most of the perspectives provided and the authors themselves come from a Western background. I know this is something that has always been present in my life and my education but I never got the chance to question it before.

I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by friends who constantly help me challenge my upbringing. Thanks to this, what I thought had one absolute truth, now has many truths and points of view. We constantly engage in discussions and share our thoughts and new articles we’ve encountered in order to expand our knowledge. Nevertheless, we have also talked about how we have been very lucky and privileged in that sense but that not everyone gets to have this same experience.

So how can we become aware of different perspectives when our environment only includes Western ideals and points of views?

How can we start questioning what has been taught to us when we don’t get the chance to explore more academic perspectives in our different fields of study?

So we sit down, a South Korean, a Norwegian and a Costa Rican, and together we spend hours discussing different aspects of decolonization and diversity in education. We take our time to analyze (and criticize) what we have been taught and the different ways that we’ve learned about history.

Decolonizing and deconstructing ourselves has been a crucial aspect of this whole personal growth we have experienced. We all understand how hard it is to honestly face past behavior and unlearn so many things that we have been told since we were born. The fact that the three of us come from very different backgrounds has also been a great tool for us to understand the importance of listening to a different discourse than the one we’ve become comfortable hearing for all our lives.

However, the more we analyze the academic literature we’ve had for the past three years, we realize the lack of diversity present in our education.

This got us to think what others have been thinking for decades, we need to decolonize (and diversify) education!

The topic of decolonization of education has many branches and it wouldn’t be possible for me to go through all of them in one blog post. But the main aspect that I want to focus on is the decolonization and diversification of academic literature that is assigned to us. I will be discussing the experience that we’ve had at the University of Amsterdam for the past three years.

For most of our courses we’ve had the opportunity to read many Western perspectives but we rarely got to read another article from an author with different ideals and upbringing. This is an issue because then it is not possible for the students to question what they are reading. It also contributes to many of the students feeling left out of the conversations. This happens because the lack of multiculturalism and intersectionality in academia basically censors many cultures and their lived experiences.

We spent an entire year discussing Brexit and the US elections but the crisis happening in Venezuela was mentioned maybe once or twice. If we only include Western perspectives and theories, then examples from other parts of the world will not even make it to the discussion.

I believe that the diversity in literature goes hand in hand with the diversification of the staff. It is simply not enough to provide the academic critique if people with different lived experiences and different backgrounds do not get the opportunity to work as teachers at the institution. Why is it that a class on Latin American identity is not taught by a Latin American academic? How can we truly learn about the Latinx identity if it is taught by someone who doesn't even belong to the culture that is being discussed?

Currently the “diversity quota” of the university is filled by hiring BIPOC as cleaners, as canteen workers and as campus groundskeeping services. However, there is not a big percentage of BIPOC working in the academic sector of the University. This contributes to normalizing the idea that BIPOC are not meant to be included in higher positions. Therefore reinforcing postcolonial ideals of white superiority.

All of the things I have mentioned, have already been discussed and protested by past students at the UvA. In 2016 during the occupation, many of these issues were raised and the University quickly swept them under the rug and currently, we see barely any change. As the UvA experiences more diversification in their students, they also begin to experience more discomfort within the student community.

Which I think is amazing! Because we cannot change things if we sit comfortably with our privilege (and we really shouldn’t).

It’s crucial that the University realizes the importance of decolonizing and diversifying the academic environment that they are promising their students. There needs to be a structural change within the institution that is reflected in its different courses and teachers.

As an institution they cannot continue to avoid having these conversations with their students and should really take them as a wake up call to re-evaluate the way that different postcolonial hierarchies are present at the UvA.