In recent years, Finnish universities have faced increasing scrutiny for their role in shaping public debate. Yet the focus has often been misplaced. Instead of confronting the structural racism and epistemic hierarchies that shape higher education, much of the mainstream media has chosen to amplify complaints about so-called “wokeness.” In doing so, they reinforce a myth: that Finnish universities are under siege by progressive students, while in truth these institutions continue to reproduce Eurocentric and patriarchal knowledge systems that devalue alternative epistemologies.
I write this as an open letter to Finnish universities, but also as a reflection on what it means to uphold academic justice. My concern is not with isolated controversies or personal discomforts, but with the deeper epistemological architecture that defines what counts as legitimate knowledge. Unless we are willing to confront these hierarchies, universities will remain complicit in sustaining systemic inequality while squandering opportunities for innovation and transformation.
Media narratives and the silencing of critique
Two articles published in Finland’s mainstream press in late 2022 illustrate the dynamics at play. In a tabloid column, a journalist cited a white, male university lecturer who lamented that his students used terms such as “privilege,” “white,” and “heteronormative” to analyze classroom discussions. For him, these conversations represented an attack on his identity rather than a challenge to the epistemological frameworks that have long dominated Finnish academia.
A second article, published in the country’s leading daily, described a university seminar on difficult conversations in education. Instead of interrogating the power asymmetries within classrooms, the article endorsed calls for “dangerous spaces” where Eurocentric epistemologies would not be questioned. The perspectives of marginalized students and staff — already underrepresented in higher education — were absent from the discussion.
What unites these interventions is not their concern for open debate, but their insistence on protecting Eurocentric norms from critique. They portray student challenges to whiteness as disruptions rather than as necessary attempts to broaden knowledge horizons. By centering the discomfort of those in dominant positions, these articles obscure the systemic exclusion faced by others.
The persistence of Europatriarchal knowledge
The Nigerian-Finnish thinker Minna Salami has coined the term “Europatriarchal knowledge” to describe the dominance of Eurocentric and patriarchal epistemologies that define what counts as credible in academic spaces. This framework captures how institutions elevate forms of knowledge that align with whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity while marginalizing others.
This epistemic hierarchy is not incidental. As Rauna Kuokkanen has argued, universities have long been structured on the assumption that there exists only one valid ontology, one universal intellectual tradition. The effect has been the systematic devaluation of Indigenous, feminist, Black, and non-Western knowledge systems. Such epistemic injustice reduces students and staff from marginalized backgrounds to a cruel binary: assimilate to the dominant order or risk being sidelined as intellectually inferior.
The problem extends beyond teaching. In a global academic economy, universities increasingly operate as engines of knowledge commercialization. Epistemologies that promise economic returns are valorized, while those that emphasize justice, solidarity, or community care are sidelined. In this sense, Finnish universities reproduce Gayatri Spivak’s observation that knowledge from the “third world” is tolerated only as marginal, never as central to the academy’s authority.
Silence, ignorance, and the comfort of dominance
One of the most insidious features of Finnish academia is the way silence and ignorance function as protectors of the status quo. bell hooks warned that silence in classrooms often stems from fear: fear of losing control when students begin to engage critically with race, class, and gender. Yet ignorance here is not accidental; it is chosen. By refusing to acknowledge the validity of non-Western epistemologies, academics maintain the illusion that their dominance is natural, when in reality it is constructed and contingent.
This dynamic does not only affect white scholars. For many academics from marginalized backgrounds, assimilation into dominant norms may feel like the only viable path to survival. To speak otherwise risks being dismissed as unscientific, emotional, or radical. Thus, Europatriarchal knowledge reproduces itself through both the compliance of the privileged and the constrained choices of the marginalized.
The lived effects on students and staff
Consider the experience of a student entering a Finnish university from a Sámi tradition, or from a Black feminist perspective. Their schooling may already have been shaped by stereotypes that limit the futures imagined for them. Once inside the university, they encounter curricula centered on Eurocentric histories, patriarchal values, and the privileging of “rationality” over emotion. Knowledge that emphasizes community, solidarity, or justice is dismissed as secondary to that which promises individual achievement and economic gain.
In such a context, every classroom becomes a “dangerous space” — not for those aligned with dominant traditions, but for students whose epistemic frameworks are constantly questioned. Intellectual discrimination manifests not in open hostility but in the daily demand to prove oneself within a system designed to exclude.
Staff experience similar dynamics. Scholars from marginalized backgrounds may be invited to contribute, but only as representatives of “diverse” perspectives that remain peripheral to the academic core. They may gain recognition but never full legitimacy. Their contributions are celebrated as exotic additions rather than as central to knowledge-making.
Towards epistemic justice
If universities are to remain relevant as spaces of learning and discovery, they must confront the limitations of Europatriarchal knowledge. This means acknowledging the loss incurred when we dismiss alternative epistemologies. It also means institutional leadership must take responsibility: change cannot be left to individual academics who risk marginalization by pushing against the grain.
The challenge is not simply to “include” marginalized perspectives within existing structures, but to transform those structures themselves. This requires dismantling the hierarchies that place Eurocentric and patriarchal knowledge at the top, and recognizing that multiple ways of knowing can coexist without being subordinated to one tradition.
Critics may argue that such moves threaten academic standards. Yet the opposite is true. By restricting knowledge to a narrow epistemic canon, universities impoverish themselves. They close off paths to creativity, innovation, and justice. Expanding the epistemic horizon is not about diluting rigor, but about enriching the very conditions under which knowledge flourishes.
Concluding reflections
The current debates about “wokeness” in Finnish universities mask a deeper reality. The real issue is not that Eurocentric traditions are being silenced, but that alternative epistemologies remain marginalized. To insist on the primacy of Europatriarchal knowledge is to ignore the intellectual and moral costs of exclusion.
Universities must ask themselves: to what extent are we willing to cling to epistemic hierarchies that reproduce injustice? And at what cost to our students, our staff, and the futures we claim to serve?
By embracing epistemic diversity, Finnish academia could become a site of transformation rather than reproduction — a place where knowledge serves not just the powerful but the many. Until then, every classroom that clings to Europatriarchal knowledge remains, for too many, a dangerous space.
