The discipline communities
Mathematics degrees in the UK are being “unnecessarily politicised” because of expectations that lecturers decolonise the curriculum, leading academics claim.
Decolonize math? I can see decolonizing a lot of things, but math?
A letter shared with Times Higher Education accuses the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) of trying to mandate a “narrowly skewed perspective on the history of mathematics” via its new subject benchmark instead of giving academics the freedom to design courses as they see fit.
Are we talking the history of math, or math itself? I can see decolonizing the first, but not the second.
The benchmark statement for mathematics, statistics and operational research (MSOR) – a document intended to establish a common understanding of what students can expect from a UK degree in this area – has grown by 50 per cent since 2019 to include sections on equality, diversity, accessibility and inclusion as well as sustainability and employment.
Equality AND diversity AND inclusion. Couldn’t they bundle all three and save some space?
The proposed guidance – which has been put out for consultation – states that “the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice”.
It adds that students “should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught”, listing examples such as how some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, and mathematicians’ connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.
Oh ffs. That’s just stupid. It’s crude, it’s childish, it’s a category mistake.
And while decolonisation might have some relevance when teaching the history of mathematics, it has little bearing on other areas of the curriculum, the letter argues.
What I’m saying. It’s meta. You can do a course on meta-math, an intellectual history type of class, and then who was or wasn’t racist could be of interest, but other than that – don’t be silly.
It’s like taking on a house maintenance project and before getting to that leak around the window taking a few years to investigate the views of glassmakers.
“We struggle to imagine what it would mean to decolonise, for example, a course on the geometry of surfaces. For the most part, the concept of decolonisation is irrelevant to university mathematics, and our students know this. If we engage in obviously tokenistic anti-racism efforts we will simply be sending a signal that we do not take racism seriously,” they write.
And/or that they think their students are all lunatics.
“These things may be very virtuous and interesting, but they are not mathematics, they are not our expertise; and mathematicians really want to talk to our students about the mathematics that fascinates them,” [Dr Armstrong] added.
A QAA spokeswoman said the benchmark statement was created by an expert advisory group “to ensure the resulting documents will be of current value to the discipline communities”.
There’s your problem right there. Stop thinking of everything in terms of “communities” and you’ll avoid a lot of this bedwetting nonsense.
Of course math should be about equality–it’s at the literal center of most equations.
And diversity–all those numbers and symbols.
And what is set theory if not a theory of inclusion?
I think what we’re seeing here is a glimpse of the shady, behind-the-scenes influence of irrational numbers.
I teach intro science courses. The last thing my students want is more content, especially when it’s only tangentially related to the material they’re actually going to be assessed on. We have yet to hear any specifics about how we are supposed to “decolonize” any of our individual courses without relying solely on simple, and frankly offensively stereotypical, tokenism. I’m not going to bother railing against the idea… will just keep asking for specific instructions. It’s embarrassing how poorly thought-out these things are when you press for specific “actionable items.”
Yes railing against the idea is my job. You have much better things to do!
OB: In ‘your job’ you are unique and world-class. Please don’t sell yourself short.
Awwwww shucks.
I’m not sure whether to be glad or disturbed that someone else is dealing with lack of instruction on key matters. When we ask our administrators to clarify what they mean or what they expect of us, we get a barrage of word salad, after which they complain that we are too lazy to do our jobs. Yeah, well, let us know what our job is – what do you want for all this equality, diversity, and inclusion? What does that look like? How are we going to do it in a community that is predominantly white? Are we going to kidnap people of color and trans people to ensure our classes are diverse enough?
Also, pointing out who is racist, sexist, etc, is, as OB pointed out, ridiculous. It is irrelevant. I talk to my students about Rosalind Franklin, and what an ass James Watson was and is, and then tell them this is an example of something they need to understand: not all the people who are brilliant in their field are nice. A scientist, or mathematician, or for that matter shit slinger, not being nice does not automatically mean their work is in error.
What a Maroon: Actually, the study of inequalities is a large and important subject in mathematics. Whole books have been written about inequalities. Many are named after famous mathematicians, such as the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality (Ukrainians would quite rightly like to add Bunyakovsky’s name), the Bessel inequality, Bell’s inequality (important in quantum mechanics), also Chebyshev, Hölder, Jensen, Kolmogorov, Minkowski, and Poincaré and many more.
Sorry, I don’t know what any of the named people thought about race, sex, or gender, nor do I care. But their inequalities are all important.
I am glad I recently retired from teaching mathematics recently, though. The very first case (as far as I know) of complaints about misgendering of students just hit the university where I taught. It’s too early yet to know if it will blow over or not, as the comments in the university paper have just started to take off. But it does not bode well. We can already read there that misgendering is a form of violence.
Harald,
Well, sure, but I was talking about equations which, by definition, show that two things are equal.
In order to properly decolonize math we’ll need to go all the way back to Incan knot accounting… Now good luck figuring that out since they never developed a written language.
‘A QAA spokeswoman said the benchmark statement was created by an expert advisory group “to ensure the resulting documents will be of current value to the discipline communities”.’
Surely that final quotation should read: “A QAA spokeswoman said the benchmark statement was created by an expert advisory group “to ensure the resulting documents will be of current value to discipline communities”.
In decolonized mathematics, are some equalities more equal than others, I wonder.