3 - Decolonizing Australian Universities: Why Embedding Indigenous Content in the Curriculum Fails That Task

Summary

Introduction

In recent years, calls for the decolonization of higher education have become widespread (Arday and Mirza, 2018). These calls do not just reflect the inclusion of diverse, racialized people into the student body and faculty, but also acknowledge that previously ignored and excluded knowledges and perspectives from the ‘colonies’, including internal colonies in settler societies, have shaped the formation of what is understood as Europe or ‘first world’ countries (Gopal, 2021).

In most countries, there have been sustained student protests and demands for decolonization of both curricula and (less so) pedagogy. As an Australian academic, I find this particularly interesting, as here the push appears to have come mostly from academics (Vass et al, 2018). Students in both the Global South and the Global North have criticized the ‘ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives’ (Morreira et al, 2020: 1). This critique identifies not only curricular but also pedagogic practices and institutional cultures that marginalize and disregard racialized students who then struggle to achieve their academic ambitions and have lower completion and higher attrition rates. In Australia, the slow and mixed success in increasing Indigenous1 participation in higher education has raised all those questions and more.

Drawing from a range of Australian examples and first- hand reflections from my journey of writing and teaching on anti- racism within higher education since the late 1970s, this chapter provides an overview of my involvement in efforts to design and deliver Aboriginal higher education and Aboriginal studies, and critical anti- racism curriculum and policy as ‘decolonizing’ moves. I argue against the privileging of curriculum reform in isolation from critical race theory and serious forms of anti- racism, amid naive assumptions about the nature of systemic and cultural racisms in Australian universities today. Several pitfalls are highlighted, including a lack of attention to power and governance, culturalist and essentialist representations of Aboriginal people, tokenism, what makes a university a safe and welcoming place for Aboriginal students, racial taxation on Aboriginal staff and becoming an accomplice rather than an ally. These failures point to a range of critical racial and decolonial literacies necessary for the task of decolonizing.