University Chaucer lecturer loses job amid row over 'decolonising of the curriculum' wins more than £70,000 for unfair dismissal
Dr Anne Marie D'Arcy fell out with the University of Leicester when she suspected bosses wanted to stop students being taught the 14th century Canterbury Tales poet, an employment tribunal heard.
At a hearing Dr D'Arcy - an expert on Chaucer - accused the institution's vice-chancellor Professor Nishan Canagarajah of saying he wanted to 'decolonise' the curriculum and introduce 'non-culturally British sources' into the English department.
Experienced Dr D'Arcy, who taught Medieval and Early Modern English Literature, lost her job in May 2021.
14th century English poet and author, Geoffrey Chaucer (pictured), is best known for The Canterbury Tales
Now, she has successfully sued the university for unfair dismissal after the tribunal awarded her £72,487 in compensation.
The hearing in Leicester was told Dr D'Arcy, who is Irish, specialised in Chaucer - often called 'the father of English literature' - and that her research was 'excellent'.
In the summer of 2020, new vice-chancellor Prof Canagarajah conducted a 'strategic review' to try to secure 'stability' for the English department.
However, it led to Dr D'Arcy accusing him of trying to get rid of Chaucer.
'In the hearing Dr D'Arcy raised the issue that Professor Canagarajah had said he wanted to 'decolonise' the curriculum, which was explained to mean less or no focus on e.g. Chaucer and more focus on English Literature from a wider range of non-culturally British sources,' the tribunal said.
At a hearing Dr D'Arcy - an expert on Chaucer - accused the institution's vice-chancellor Professor Nishan Canagarajah (pictured) of saying he wanted to 'decolonise' the curriculum and introduce 'non-culturally British sources' into the English department
At a meeting in October 2020, the possibility of 'slimming down' the department was raised, leading to Dr D'Arcy becoming upset.
'The effect of this thought on Dr D'Arcy was significant', the report said.
Seven English lecturers and three Medieval Literature lecturers were at risk of losing jobs.
Rumours of 'decolonising' the curriculum were leaked to the press.
Dr Anne Marie D'Arcy fell out with the University of Leicester (pictured) when she suspected bosses wanted to stop students being taught the 14th century Canterbury Tales poet
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13833285/University-Chaucer-lecturer-redundant-amid-row-decolonising-curriculum-wins-70-000-unfair-dismissal-tribunal-says-no-evidence-cultural-cancellation.html
Welcome to the University of WOKE! Leicester has ditched Chaucer, is 'decolonising' its syllabus and marks 'International Womxn's Week'... no wonder it's turning into a first-class failure
Even though it may not boast any dreaming spires or belong to the Russell Group of leading universities, there was a time not so very long ago when Leicester University punched well above the weight of its provincial rivals.
Named Britain’s ‘University of the Year’ in 2008, with a heritage that encompassed great thinkers such as novelist Malcolm Bradbury, a former student, poet Philip Larkin, one of its old librarians, and Sir David Attenborough, who lived on the attractive campus as a child, it was home to nearly 23,000 students.
Exactly a decade ago, Leicester came 17th in the Guardian University Guide’s national league tables, and was also top university for ‘student satisfaction’ outside Oxbridge.
In a bullish Annual Report, titled ‘Elite without being Elitist’, Leicester outlined a grand plan to become ‘an established top ten UK university’, as well as the best in the country for ‘teaching quality’ within a few years.
The document announced an ‘ambitious £1billion investment plan’ to build state-of-the-art new facilities that would ‘allow student numbers to grow to 25,000’.
That was then. But things didn’t exactly work out. Today Leicester is ranked a lowly 77th out of the UK’s 121 universities, according to the most recent Guardian league table.
Its latest Annual Report, covering the 2018/19 academic year, shows that student numbers have dropped to 18,338 and are falling by around 4 per cent annually. The intake was a mere 2,855, down from 3,668 a year earlier, while the overall number of international students dropped from 5,384 to 4,902.
However, one of the few fields where Leicester University does appear to be excelling is that of political correctness. Here, it is truly world-beating. Indeed, against stiff opposition, one might justifiably declare this humble seat of learning to be Britain’s most ‘woke’ university.
Take, for example, this week’s kerfuffle involving Leicester’s once-esteemed English Literature department. On Wednesday, staff were abruptly told by their superiors that they want to drop Geoffrey Chaucer and other great medieval writers from the syllabus.
Apparently, these titans of English literature are no longer deemed to be worth studying. Instead, management used an email to outline proposals to create a curriculum devoted to ‘diversity’.
The highly controversial plans mean that tutors who specialise in the 14th-century writer, widely known as the ‘father of English poetry’, now face redundancy, as potentially do colleagues who teach such apparently unfashionable texts as Beowulf, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.
The work of John Donne and Christopher Marlowe will also reportedly be side-lined.
In their place will come a diverse array of modern writers, many of whom cover such modish topics as race relations and feminism.
This will allow Leicester’s new-look English course to cover what the email describes as: ‘a chronological literary history, a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum, and new employability modules’.
This apparently is what today’s young students, who must pay fees of around £10,000 a year to study English at Leicester, ‘expect’.
Leicester has named two of the writers who will remain on the curriculum as the African-American novelists Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson this week accused the university of ‘absolute madness’, while even the ultra-liberal University and College Union dubbed the plans ‘short-sighted and intellectually void’.
As historian Ian Mortimer argued in these pages yesterday, Geoffrey Chaucer may not have shared modern attitudes to race, sexuality, or gender, but his work was actually highly progressive for its era — the Wife of Bath, for example, is often dubbed the first feminist icon.
But we digress. For this week’s absurd row was not an isolated incident. And neither did it occur by accident. Instead, Geoffrey Chaucer appears to represent the first major casualty in an ill-thought-out campaign by Leicester’s £250,000-a-year vice-chancellor Professor Nishan Canagarajah to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.
He arrived in November 2019, and promptly undertook a trendy rebranding exercise in which Leicester adopted a new PR slogan: ‘Citizens of Change’. The term is now plastered across university literature and social media channels, where it is often used in place of the term ‘students’ to describe undergraduates.
In other words, it repositions Leicester not as an institution of academic excellence but, instead, as sort of happy-clappy teaching ground for tub-thumping campaigners and activists.
A somewhat patronising TV advertisement, launched before Christmas, targets potential new students with the sales pitch: ‘From tackling social inequality to getting everyone to smile more. It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, make the change that matters to you!’
The opening page of Leicester’s prospectus, meanwhile, now consists of a poem entitled, ‘What Makes a Citizen of Change?’ which describes at length the sort of people it regards as being welcome on campus. This community is, it claims: ‘forward looking… globally connected.. agitators and instigators… diverse in our make-up’.
Last March, the university attracted nationwide ridicule for re-branding International Women’s Day as ‘International Womxn’s Day’, declaring that the term was more friendly to the transgender community.
‘We use the term womxn as a more inclusive spelling of woman that includes any person who identifies as womxn,’ read its newsletter.
Cynics point out that a better way for Leicester to demonstrate its commitment to women’s rights might be to actually pay them the same as men.
According to the university’s most recent gender pay gap report, its female staff currently earn a paltry 82p for every pound their male colleagues take home. Moreover, it reveals that men who work there are nearly 50 per cent more likely than women employees to get a bonus. And when they do, that bonus tends to be 66 per cent bigger.
Then, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests, Professor Canagarajah gave a prominent interview to the Press Association in which he declared that universities must do more to ‘diversify’ their workforce and recruit more staff and students from ethnic minorities. There’s still more work to be done to truly decolonise the curriculum.’
‘The English BA at Leicester has been changed to include more diverse texts and authors set and written in countries across the world. The reading list now includes Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and NW by Zadie Smith.’
English isn’t the only field in which Leicester started to make headline-grabbing contributions to the culture wars, either. On the history front, to cite another topical example, the university took the helm of the National Trust’s highly controversial ‘Colonial Countryside’ programme, which has seen it invite teams of schoolchildren into its properties to lecture staff and visitors about the horrors of the British Empire.
Leicester’s contribution to the programme is led by Professor Corinne Fowler, a Left-wing academic who appears to devote a hefty and perhaps unhealthy portion of her free time to picking arguments on Twitter.
As the Mail recently disclosed, her attitude to rural Britain is perhaps evident from the title of her recent book, Green Unpleasant Land, which dubs the countryside ‘a terrain of inequalities’ and suggests gardening and botany are racist because, ‘the scientific categorisation of plants has at times engaged in the same hierarchies of “race” that justified empire and slave and slavery’.
The book also portrays pheasants as symbols of cultural appropriation, and declares the blackening of faces by some Morris dancing troupes to be ‘a potent symbol of rural racism’.
Professor Fowler edited the National Trust’s provocative and error-strewn ‘gazetteer’, detailing alleged links between its properties and colonialism. It named and shamed the former home of William Wordsworth, even though he was a lifelong campaigner against slavery, on the grounds that his brother once sailed to the Far East; as well as those of Rudyard Kipling because he wrote about the British Empire; and Winston Churchill, whose entry managed to ignore his achievement in saving the world from the Nazi holocaust.
The text angered not only a swathe of the Trust’s members and natural supporters, but also the descendants of many of Britain’s landed families, who argued that it falsely claimed their ancestral fortunes had been built on the proceeds of slavery.
Some, perhaps facetiously, wondered why a blue-chip heritage charity with billions of pounds in assets ought to be entrusting such an important research project not to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead to an establishment whose history department is currently ranked 73rd in the UK, behind the likes of Canterbury Christ Church, Edge Hill and Greenwich.
There may be further choppy waters ahead. For as the topical saying goes, people who choose to go ‘woke’ often seem to end up going broke.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9177639/Leicester-ditched-Chaucer-marks-International-Womxns-Week-no-wonder-failing.html
Why Chaucer is still a tale for our times: As woke academics banish the famed poet from a 'decolonised' syllabus, a top historian says the writer's stories of love, lust and greed are as relevant today as they were seven centuries ago
- Leicester University courses featuring The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are under threat
- Historian Ian Mortimer is dismayed the university is proposing replacement modules focused on race and sexuality in a new, 'decolonised' curriculum
- Mortimer says he finds the proposals 'not only depressing but profoundly wrong'
The poet W.H. Auden said that to understand your own country, you ought to have lived in at least two others.
As a historian, I've taken a different tack: to show readers what life was like for people living in the 14th century; in Elizabethan England; during the Restoration of 1660; and the Regency some 160 years later.
That way, I believe, we might be able to see our own lives and times in a different and revealing light.
When I was researching my 'guide' to medieval England, no writer brought to life that period as richly and vividly as Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English literature and the greatest poet of the Middle Ages.
Which is why I read with such dismay that a British university is now proposing to stop teaching Chaucer and his great medieval contemporaries to English literature students — indeed, to stop teaching all literature before 1500AD — in favour of modules on race and sexuality in a new, 'decolonised' curriculum.
If this goes ahead, out will go Chaucer's magnificent Canterbury Tales, along with the epic poem Beowulf, Viking sagas and texts covering the legend of King Arthur.
They will be replaced with a 'selection of employability modules' and a 'chronological literary history', as outlined by the University of Leicester's management.
Thank goodness that Shakespeare — born in 1564 — still makes the cut!
I find these proposals not only depressing but profoundly wrong — as well as incredibly short-sighted and counter-productive.
For no one understood both his own era and the human condition better than Geoffrey Chaucer.
His endlessly fertile imagination held up a light to his society — and, as anyone who reads him now discovers, it can still do the same today.
Chaucer — who led a fascinating life as MP, courtier, diplomat and civil servant — set in motion through his poetry a brilliant tradition.
Out will go Chaucer's magnificent Canterbury Tales, along with the epic poem Beowulf (pictured: first folio of epic poem), Viking sagas and texts covering the legend of King Arthur
Unlike most educated people, he wrote not in Latin or French, but proudly in English: the language spoken by ordinary people.
In doing so, he captured the voices of characters who, while six centuries old, even now leap vividly from the page.
The Canterbury Tales, his greatest work, describes a group of pilgrims, of all social classes, who are travelling to the Kent town together and who tell stories to pass the time.
The best storyteller, they agree, will win a prize at the end.
These men and women may be pilgrims, but as Chaucer shows us, they are as much interested in the earthly as the celestial.
There's scandalous extra-marital sex (including, at one point, up a tree), prostitution (a monk is the procurer), scatology and other shocking vulgarity — but there's plenty of nuance, too.
The unforgettable Wife of Bath holds her own among the bickering pilgrims and, insisting loudly on her independence, refuses to play along with the sexist customs of her society.
Like Dickens, Chaucer was a genius who could look at the people around him and capture their essence in a few short words.
The vivid historical details are compelling. From his Shipman's Tale I learnt how high-ranking guests would tip their host's lowliest servant.
From his Reeve's Tale, I learnt even a mean-spirited miller would offer penniless students a bed for the night if they had nowhere else to go — even though it meant them sharing a room with the miller and his family.
But Chaucer also explores the timeless passions and foibles of men and women. How so? Well, those ungrateful students in The Reeve's Tale go on to seduce the miller's wife and daughter.
In The Knight's Tale, two great men, heroes of their time, are drawn into a violent duel over a woman — a shared passion as old as humanity.
Quite simply, all human life is here — and it transcends time. What is that if not 'diversity'?
Too many cultural commentators and young people — and university departments — seem to think diversity is a new phenomenon. But we've been diversifying since the dawn of time.
And what about the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf which has also fallen foul of the 'decolonists'. Centuries before the Lord Of The Rings and Game Of Thrones caught our imagination, Beowulf explored the same bloody territory — and in far richer fashion.
Now, this world of wonder for literature students is to be abolished and replaced with contemporary 'social' concerns. It is deeply and fatally misguided.
How can we deny our undergraduates the opportunity to study this beautiful, enriching, funny, poignant — and often very rude — literary heritage, and insist modern societal controversies are more important?
I am all for taking a fresh look at the way English literature is taught, and I wholly endorse widening the 'canon' so that more writers from BAME backgrounds are taught — not to mention more women authors.
But I cannot shake off the feeling that this latest announcement is a poorly thought-out attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of a generation raised on modern and often febrile debates over issues such as race and gender.
Why else would the staff of Leicester's English department have been told that 'students expect' modules to be chosen not for their history, their significance or how much thought and feeling they might provoke — but how 'diverse' they are?
Is it really up to undergraduates to dictate academic syllabuses?
Isn't the point of university that you learn something new — not have your prejudices, and we all have those, confirmed?
But I cannot shake off the feeling that this latest announcement is a poorly thought-out attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of a generation raised on modern and often febrile debates over issues such as race and gender. Pictured: The University of Leicester
Little wonder that there is now real panic in academia — from the dreaming spires to the red-bricks — as dons fear being dragooned into introducing courses that conform ever more closely to modern preferences.
Chaucer is just the latest victim. From race to gender and sexuality, we are increasingly failing to understand or even study the beliefs and attitudes of the past, however much we might disagree with them today.
Instead, ideas, people and even history itself are being 'cancelled', banned from even being discussed as if they never existed at all.
The truth is that it is only by embracing our literary heritage that we can see how much our human nature has in fact stayed much the same — from Beowulf to Harry Potter.
Our opinions on individual social issues might shift: the Regency, for example, was more drunken than the Victorian age that followed it, and some TV sitcoms from the 1970s would never be aired today.
But all human beings have loved, felt anger, jealousy, greed and fear, bickered with their families, suffered loss and wanted safety, health and prosperity for their children.
Chaucer underlines all this as well as anyone else — often as the first expressing it in written English.
Universities need to learn a lesson from history. Looking at society purely in the present moment is not enough.
You need to go back and hear the voices of the past. Though they may be very different from ours, they still have much to teach us.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9174027/As-academics-banish-Chaucer-syllabus-historian-says-poets-work-relevant.html
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