Edinburgh University cancels the Enlightenment

18th Century philosophers from Kant to Voltaire were “racist” so Edinburgh's self-flagellation is just silly

Dead philosophers struggle session

Edinburgh University never learns. Not content with attracting ridicule for the mind-numbing philistinism of cancelling Scotland’s greatest ever philosopher, David Hume, over a racist footnote to an 18th-century essay, it now seems intent on cancelling the entire university on grounds of historic hate crime and harbouring Enlightenment philosophers.

In 2020, the David Hume Tower was renamed “40 George Square” because the university was too ashamed to be associated with his name. Now, the Dugald Stewart Building is expected to go the same way after a university-commissioned investigation of 18th-century student notebooks revealed that the moral philosopher and mathematician may have entertained hierarchical views on race.

Shock horror.

If so, Stewart was in the company of just about every Enlightenment philosopher from Kant to Hegel. They all believed in a racial hierarchies. Voltaire was an out-and-out racist who thought black people were little better than apes. Rousseau’s “noble savages” were, well, savages.

At least Dugald Stewart, like Hume, was a lifelong opponent of slavery. So were many 18th-century Edinburgh lecturers like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, the fathers of economics and sociology respectively. Yet they have also been fingered by the witch-hunters for cancellation on grounds of racist adjacency.

Last week’s report, “Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh’s History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonisation”, seems unaware that Edinburgh was heavily influenced by the ferment of Abolitionism that gripped Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Dialectical Society held countless debates on slavery. The former Nigerian slave, John Edmonstone, who taught Charles Darwin, lectured at Edinburgh. Jean-Baptiste Philippe, one of the first black students of medicine, studied at Edinburgh. So later did Jessie Ewing Glasgow Jr., pamphleteer and chronicler of the Harper’s Ferry slave revolt.

But, look, we can all play this pointless game. Of course there were racists in Edinburgh University as there were everywhere. Abraham Lincoln had views which today would be called racist. The US Democratic Party of Barack Obama supported segregation until the middle of the last century. The Guardian, which last week condemned Edinburgh as a “haven for white supremacist theories”, backed the Confederate states in the American Civil War.

Tendentious research helps no one. The review was chaired by Prof Tommy J. Curry, a specialist, we are told, in critical race theory, and Dr Nicki Frith, an expert in repatriation. Their conclusions, consequently, are hardly surprising. Edinburgh University made an “outsize” contribution, we are told, to racist thinking and benefited materially from racist alumni and from slavery. Yet it is ludicrous to single out Edinburgh as being in some way uniquely racist in the 18th Century when these ideas were ubiquitous. This is what Scotland’s leading historian, Professor Tom Devine, calls “presentism”: applying the moral preoccupations of the 21st Century to historical figures.

One of the report’s main recommendations, significantly, is for Edinburgh to “unadopt” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. It also demands that the university “divests” from companies with contracts with the Israeli government. Not sure what this has to do with racist philosophers who lived over 200 years before Israel existed, but perhaps I’m missing something.

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 “donors linked to enslavement, colonial conquests and [racial] pseudosciences”. These are worth, wait for it, £9.4 million. Edinburgh University’s income last year was £1.4 billion, so I suggest this racist contribution is nugatory. The report solemnly records also that, over history, the institution has benefited from a total of £30 million from those sources - at today’s prices. This is risible.

The cash, it says, should be redirected to hiring more academics from “minority backgrounds” teaching, inevitably, about racism. Since 18 percent of students at Edinburgh are BAME - three times the proportion in Scotland which is 95 percent white - you might have thought the institution is already doing its bit for diversity. But because many are Asian, perhaps they don’t count.

This exercise in racial defamation looks like another own goal by Edinburgh Principal Peter Mathieson, who was responsible for the David Hume debacle. He has promised scholarships for “minority groups” as reparation. Perhaps this should come from his own salary of £422,000, which is nearly two and a half times that of the First Minister of Scotland.

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