An ongoing debate among scholars and educational activists remains concerned with the meaning of colonialism as a problem in the present. For some, colonialism was a relatively truncated historical experience defined by a diversity of haphazard, contradictory and incoherent efforts by some European states to rule the world. In this view, colonialism's reach may have been globally ambitious, destructive even, but its depth was extremely uneven. In addition, they would argue, it was unsuccessful in its long-term ambitions to rearrange the consciousness and comportment of the colonised in any enduring way. Understood in this way, colonialism has had a limited cultural and political effect on previously colonised parts of the world, even if its enduring economic effect remains palpable. On the other hand, there are those who argue that European colonialism fundamentally reconstituted the worlds it encountered and has subsequently authored the dominant forms of cultural, political and economic sensibilities that we call modernity today. In this view, European imperial and colonial rule dominated the worlds of the colonised through force and modes of governance aiming to rearrange the way the colonised thought of their history, themselves and others. In this argument, colonialism was a formative moment starting at least in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas and it was both geo graphically expensive and culturally and politically formative, to the extent that modernity itself could be described today as colonial modernity. In this view, the legacy of colonialism in the present is anything but superficial, limited or anachronistically situated in the past. On the contrary, proponents of this view argue that colonialism has authored the most vexing ailments in the modern world, whether these be the structural economic relations between the Global South and the Global North; inherited forms of fractures, fissures and violences; or its haunting racialised ontologies of being, the legacies that continue to structure the calculus of whose lives matter more on a global scale.

These two ways of thinking about colonialism in the present staged the grounds for predicaments taken up in this book in the field of public higher education. As either/or choices, the view that colonialism has little relevance in today's world and the inverse view that colonialism means everything in today's world might feel like zero-sum choices.