{"id":298948,"date":"2025-07-28T16:50:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T16:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/298948\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T16:50:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T16:50:11","slug":"edinburgh-universitys-decolonization-drive-is-stuck-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/298948\/","title":{"rendered":"Edinburgh University\u2019s decolonization drive is stuck in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Edinburgh never learns. Not content with attracting ridicule for the mind-numbing philistinism of disowning<\/a> Scotland\u2019s greatest ever philosopher, David Hume, over a racist footnote to an 18th-century essay, the institution now seems intent on canceling itself on grounds of historic hate crimes and harboring Enlightenment philosophers.<\/p>\n

David Hume Tower is now called 40 George Square. The Dugald Stewart Building is expected to go the same way after a new university-commissioned investigation<\/a> of 18th-century student notebooks revealed that the moral philosopher and mathematician may have entertained hierarchical views on race. If so, Stewart was in the company of just about every Enlightenment philosopher from Kant to Hegel, all of whom believed in racial hierarchies. Voltaire was an out-and-out racist<\/a> who thought black people were little better than apes. Rousseau\u2019s \u201cnoble savages\u201d were, well, savages.<\/p>\n

At least Stewart, like Hume, was a lifelong campaigner against slavery. So were many 18th-century Edinburgh lecturers such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, the fathers of economics and sociology respectively. Naturally, they have also been nominated for cancellation on grounds of racist adjacency.<\/p>\n

This new review<\/a>, \u201cDecolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh\u2019s History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonisation\u201d, skirts around the fact that Edinburgh was also caught up in the ferment of abolitionism that gripped Scotland in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The Dialectical Society held countless debates on slavery. The former slave John Edmonstone<\/a>, who taught Charles Darwin, lectured at Edinburgh. Jean-Baptiste Philippe<\/a>, one of the first black students of medicine, attended Edinburgh. So did Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr<\/a>, pamphleteer and chronicler of the Harper\u2019s Ferry slave revolt.<\/p>\n

Of course, there were racists within Edinburgh University as there were everywhere. Abraham Lincoln held views which today would be labelled racist. The Democratic Party of Barack Obama was openly discriminatory until the middle of the last century. The Guardian, which yesterday reported<\/a> on Edinburgh having been a \u201chaven for white supremacist theories\u201d, supported<\/a> the Confederate states in the American Civil War.<\/p>\n

Tendentious research helps no one. The review was chaired by Professor Tommy J. Curry, a specialist in critical race theory, and Dr Nicola Frith, an expert in repatriation. The conclusions are therefore hardly surprising.<\/p>\n

Still, one of its main recommendations, intriguingly, is for Edinburgh to \u201cunadopt\u201d the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The review also demands that the university \u201cdivests\u201d from companies with contracts with the Israeli government. It\u2019s not entirely clear what this has to do with racist philosophers who lived two centuries before Israel existed.<\/p>\n

Really, the only remotely relevant issue is whether or not Edinburgh still benefits from slavery wealth. The report reveals that the university still has bequests from \u201cdonors linked to enslavement, colonial conquests and [racial] pseudosciences\u201d. These are worth \u00a39.4 million, a nugatory fraction of Edinburgh\u2019s \u00a31.4 billion income last year. The report also solemnly records that, over history, the institution has benefited from a total of \u00a330 million from those sources \u2014 at today\u2019s prices.<\/p>\n

The cash, it says, should be redirected to hiring more academics from \u201cminority backgrounds\u201d teaching, inevitably, about racism. Since the proportion of non-white students at Edinburgh is around 18%<\/a>, more than three times the proportion in Scotland as a whole (which is 95% white), you might think the university is doing its bit for diversity. But since a large portion of these are Asian, perhaps they don\u2019t count in the eyes of the decolonization crowd.<\/p>\n

This exercise in racial defamation looks like another own goal by Edinburgh Principal Peter Mathieson, who was responsible for the Hume debacle. Mathieson has promised scholarships for \u201cminority groups\u201d as reparation. Perhaps this should come from his own salary<\/a> of \u00a3422,000, which is nearly two and a half times that of the First Minister of Scotland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The University of Edinburgh never learns. Not content with attracting ridicule for the mind-numbing philistinism of disowning Scotland\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8816],"tags":[748,110708,101477,1102,33880,4884,11187,980,15894,712,39124,4678,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-298948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edinburgh","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-david-hume","10":"tag-decolonisation","11":"tag-edinburgh","12":"tag-edinburgh-university","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-non-classifiu00e9e","15":"tag-optional","16":"tag-racism","17":"tag-scotland","18":"tag-slavery","19":"tag-society","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}