No, decolonising your bookshelf doesn’t mean getting rid of Jane Austen

It was recently falsely reported that a university was 'decolonising' its curriculum by removing Jane Austen | Alamy Stock Photo

The headline in The Daily Telegraph was stark: “Jane Austen dropped from university’s English course to ‘decolonise the curriculum’”. The story was quickly picked up elsewhere.

Austen had been “cancelled” in favour of Black American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, reported GB News, the right-wing, opinion-led TV channel that launched last year as a corrective to “woke warriors”. The Daily Mail went with a particularly provocative headline: “No Pride, lots of Prejudice”.

Little heed was paid to the statement issued by the Scottish university at the centre of the row. Denying the “erroneous media reports”, a spokesperson for the University of Stirling said it had “not withdrawn or replaced – nor do we have plans to withdraw or replace – the teaching of Jane Austen from our curriculum”.

But it was too late for the facts – decolonisation was back in the national debat…