‘Your rent is due, higher education’: beyond apologies and towards reparations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognising that many universities have approached ‘decolonisation’ in superficial and tokenistic ways, this article invites readers to critically and reflexively consider the possibilities and challenges of pursuing reparations as a response to universities’ colonial entanglements. It suggests that meaningful reparations would entail both material and relational repair in ways that interrupt business as usual, deepen universities’ commitments to social and ecological well-being, and support the educational self-determination of systemically marginalised communities. The article positions reparations as a viable pathway for addressing historical and ongoing harm while fostering the conditions for genuinely different educational futures to emerge. It also specifically examines how a reparative approach might be applied to institutional practices and policies related to decolonisation and climate change. Finally, it considers the complexities and circularities that tend to arise in these efforts, particularly in contexts where efforts to address systemic harm are met with highly polarised responses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".