> For instance, instead of presenting a proposal like the one hand at hand "top down" - which now meets a predictable opposition - it could be a more successful long-term strategy to get all of the affected people into the same boat first, and then move forward with strong support, rather than dropping suggestions for what appear like radical changes.
But this isn't a "top down" proposal to change everything. This is a 30 page document by an independent rankings agency that mentions "decolonisation" twice, both in sentences which advise mentioning the historical context of certain mathematical developments (congratulations, your lecture mentions in passing that Spearman came up with his rank correlation coefficient in part to justify his horrible racial hierarchy theories, but it's useful for other things too. Curriculum decolonised!) which I suspect some lecturers have been doing for years. Some people are going to disagree no matter what the change is and how it's suggested.
Examples of actual "top down" proposals in the culture war come from government ministers insisting that the National Trust shouldn't be referencing Churchill's position on India in its Churchill exhibitions lest it paint him in a less-than-heroic light and threatening to make university funding contingent on universities hosting particular speakers. For some reason HN is convinced that student petitions and consultation documents are a more egregious abuse of power though...
But this isn't a "top down" proposal to change everything. This is a 30 page document by an independent rankings agency that mentions "decolonisation" twice, both in sentences which advise mentioning the historical context of certain mathematical developments (congratulations, your lecture mentions in passing that Spearman came up with his rank correlation coefficient in part to justify his horrible racial hierarchy theories, but it's useful for other things too. Curriculum decolonised!) which I suspect some lecturers have been doing for years. Some people are going to disagree no matter what the change is and how it's suggested.
Examples of actual "top down" proposals in the culture war come from government ministers insisting that the National Trust shouldn't be referencing Churchill's position on India in its Churchill exhibitions lest it paint him in a less-than-heroic light and threatening to make university funding contingent on universities hosting particular speakers. For some reason HN is convinced that student petitions and consultation documents are a more egregious abuse of power though...