Reds under the bed at Oxford?

A minor ‘red scare’ appears to have erupted at Oxford University. Two American undergraduates were instructed to read work on ‘dependency theory’ for their custom-made course on development and international political economy. Dependency theory, though now marginalised, was a huge part of the field, particularly in Latin American writing, from the 1960s through to the 1980s. It suggested that the world comprised a developed, Western, capitalist ‘core’ and an exploited, dependent ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ in the Global South. It simply isn’t possible to teach this subject properly without discussion of this theory.

Nonetheless, the students denounced their tutor to the director of their study abroad programme as ‘a communist’, and the director responded by cancelling the course and transferring the students to another tutor who would teach them mainstream economics. Although it’s amusing that ‘communists’ continue to inspire such alarmed reactions, the director’s response is extremely worrying: rather than explaining the importance of being exposed at university to all sorts of competing viewpoints and judging between them, she endorsed their view that their own prejudices should dictate how and what tutors may teach.

Lee Jones