More thinking about “business-critical”, “primary” tasks (and reading Fitton et al., 2026)

Fitton et al. (2026) describe a the difficulties that teachers describe in working with a project aimed at decolonizing the curriculum, and that might partly explain why there is so little progress on decolonialization.

The main themes they find are

• “Eleventh-hour teaching”: Teaching is not planned strategically or long-term enough for anyone to actually have the time or responsibility to put major efforts into redesigning anything. People are on short-term contracts so come in last minute or don’t know if they’ll ever teach a course again, only find out they’ll be teaching a course right before it starts, and just generally have too many things on their plate.
• “Lack of ownership”: Since there isn’t any strong guidance from leadership, the work is only done by people who do it out of their own conviction (and they probably tend to be the ones that take on all the “soft” topics anyway, so even more work on people that are already working too much)
• “I’m not the EDI guy”: People don’t know how to have difficult conversation; only know the “dead white men” in science themselves; use the same texts they themselves were taught from, or at least texts that are traditionally used; overrepresented populations in jobs tend to also be overrepresented in textbook authors
• “Collective disillusionment”: Teachers are worried about job security, have an ever-increasing workload anyway, feel that it is “implausible to start anything new”

All of these feel so familiar to me — not specifically in the context of decolonialization, but with DEI work, with sustainability, with super important but non-“business-critical” work. What stood out to me specifically is where the authors decribe the cop-out strategies (my words, not the authors) that more privileged teachers use: “one white male staff member detailing how he ‘encouraged’ a ‘younger’ female colleague to take on more labour to improve the gender diversity of their offering. The colleague he was encouraging was hierarchically junior and precariously employed. This work tends to be framed as an opportunity, but plays into a meritocratic ideology that is sustained by exploitative casual labour“; and white males self-describing as not the right kind of person to do this work, it should be done by female, non-white staff… Where have I experienced similar things before?

Reading this article reminded me of Sundström & Holmberg (2018)‘s peripheral tasks, that as important as they are (in their case IT security, in my application of their theory sustainability) are not aligned with the main mission of the organization, not business-critical as Fitton et al. (2026) call it. Fitton et al. (2026) discuss it in even more practical terms of precarious employment, not enough security around what courses will be offered when, who will even be employed to teach them at that point. Some of this could be fixed by allocating more resources (if the organization really thought it was important), but clearly there are also questions about who is qualified to do the work, how more people could become qualified, and how to raise the importance of the work relative to competing tasks, i.e. make them part of the organization’s core mission. According to Sundström & Holmberg (2018), primary tasks cannot be actively influenced, they “just are”. Which might be the case, but somehow I don’t want to believe that just yet :-)

Fitton, T., Adewumi, B., Bailey, L. R., Moore, J. W., & Amoah, L. M. A. (2026). ‘It’s all very well having a diverse curriculum, but if there is no curriculum, it can be as diverse as you like’: Precarity and decolonising in the neoliberal UK higher education system. British Educational Research Journal.

Featured image, and pics below, from when I was in Oslo at the end of January for Gerry’s defense. These are taken from right outside the Fram museum…