You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.

Good evening. The European empires may have turned to dust two generations ago,

but an influential report out this week suggests their spirit lives on in our universities.

The report commissioned by the university's regulator calls for an end to the curriculum being dominated by Western values and beliefs,

in which it says positions anything non-European and non-white as inferior.

It says this puts off black and minority ethnic students

and explains their relatively low attainment in higher education.

In short, it wants universities and what they teach decolonised.

This has not yet been adopted as official policy, and critics have called it tokenism.

Ridicule the idea of judging literature, philosophy, culture generally on the basis of skin colour.

It would they say entrench the racism it seeks to remove.

Are there too many dead white men on the curriculum, or are we

about to sacrifice the world's greatest thinkers on the altar of political correctness? Our moral

maize tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, the historian Tim Stanley,

the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, and the priest and polemicist, Charles Fraser.

Tim Stanley, you're a historian. What do you make of this?

As a writer and teacher of history, I find identity politics very, very useful.

As a historian, you want to hear from as many voices as possible from the past in order to understand what really happened.

And black women and queer history, all these things can help us to do that

and increase our understanding of the past. I do, however, have two issues, which I'm

dispassionate about, I'm objective about, but I want to get to the heart of them. One, I want

to critique this idea of replacement, the idea that you might say, well, Plato is a dead white

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