The dawn’s waking orb shines brighter on those who still hope for a better world. For young assemblyman and mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani’s rise from diaspora’s margins to the nucleus of American politics is not just a political groundbreaker but a metaphor for the global efforts to decolonize institutions—from Congress to classrooms.
Empire falls slowly: sometimes in the streets of Queens and other times in classrooms; a truth that the sandstone towers of University of Glasgow is a witness to and is beginning to confront.
Zohran’s father Mahmood Mamdani argues in London Review of Education that “Decolonising the university means reforming not only the curriculum but also the very institutional structures that reproduce the colonial encounter in contemporary education.” But diversifying is easy, decolonizing is not. The project of decolonization begins with questioning why some systems of learning adopted in the Western world are crowned “universal” while others are silenced as primitive and obsolete. An appropriate example would be in the politics of taxonomy: how World Literature and English Literature are partitioned and separated. Frantz Fanon’s remark in Black Skin, White Masks renders the notion that the essential qualities of man are expressed only in European thought, to be null and void. The ultimate aim of decolonisation should not be limited to political independence but liberation from the internalisation of such inferiority; to abandon inherited systems of knowledge to create sui generis and self-defined alternatives.
Zohran Mamdani’s background and victory as the first South Asian leader alters our perspectives on how power, identity, knowledge in contemporary society are shifting. To this, the University of Glasgow has responded with impressive vitality. The College of Science and Engineering has launched “Decolonising the Curriculum Community of Practice” since 2022 bringing together external collaborators to share perspectives. The School of Law opened a “Decolonising the School of Law Forum” in 2023‑24, explicitly stating that “the pervasiveness of Western sources of knowledge as our ‘common knowledge’ has created stubborn and enduring structural inequalities and racial injustice in our higher education establishments.”
The School of Physics and Astronomy has come up with Decolonising the Physical Sciences where they evaluate which contributions are recognised and which are overlooked and how societal norms contribute to such inequalities. Further the Adam Smith Business School has also adopted workshop and seminar style approach for students to reflect on questions like, “What is your understanding of decolonisation?” “What does it mean to you?” and ultimately, the School of English Literature and Culture: Modernities, abandons many anglophile texts for classes on Dress and Modernity in Central Asia where Prof. Jamie Rann examined the position of women in Soviet Uzbekistan to understand modernity’s relation with coloniality. A workshop titled “Decolonising the Curriculum in your Discipline”, held online on 28 October 2025, designed for professional staff to explore, review, and reshape pedagogical materials and practices through a decolonial lens.
Additionally, the University of Glasgow besides being a historical literary pilgrimage, also emerges as a steadfast global crossroad with a global representation in the highest sense with the largest number of international students bringing in distinct voices, personality, and perspectives meets this situation with urgency and resonance blending Scotland’s history with the unique realities of its student body.
Mamdani’s victory is a symbolic moment for diaspora voices globally—it shows us decolonisation is not an abstract concept but a shared reality that is lived and urgent and Glasgow’s faculty and students are appropriately addressing the need of the hour with dialogues, initiatives, and persistence.
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