Concordia University 'Decolonises' Engineering
This will mark out the university as a place to avoid if you’re hoping for a serious education.
This five-year strategic plan will put Concordia on the map. We’re telling the world this is what we’re doing, and this is how we’re doing it.
This was part of a recent statement by Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, the Director of Decolonizing Curriculum and Pedagogy at Canada’s Concordia University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. She was talking about the university’s new five-year strategic plan to decolonize and indigenize its entire curriculum and pedagogy. The university’s provost, Anne Whitelaw, agreed: “This strategic plan … will change the ways in which we teach at Concordia.”
Goodleaf and Whitelaw are correct. This initiative will put Concordia on the map and change teaching practices at the university—but not in a positive way. The probable effect will be that Concordia becomes known for leading the charge backwards, away from reality and towards something more irrational. If so, this will mark out the university as a place to avoid if you’re hoping for a serious education or training in the fundamental disciplines that comprise modern scholarship. Concordia graduates will then be stigmatized for the simple reason that the university has promoted ideology over reality.
