The University of Edinburgh’s comedy show, aptly performed during the Festival Fringe, continues. In June, it brought us the highest-paid Scottish vice-chancellor who does not know how much he is paid. Now it presents us with a report enticingly called Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh’s History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.
It is almost as if the powers that be at my alma mater are digging under the foundations of Old College, the beating heart of the university, and planting high explosive charges with the intention of bringing the whole comedy show down on top of themselves. Mind you, the process has been going on for a while. Take, for example, the renaming of the prominent David Hume Tower because Hume did not quite grasp that black people were as good as white people. Never mind all his other contributions to Enlightenment thinking – he was mistaken, and he believed what many mistakenly thought at the time.
The kicker is that almost nobody knew about this until a certain Elizabeth Lund started an online petition, and everyone who was offended signed it. Now we all know. But David Hume was just the start. Now it seems that almost anyone of note who was associated with the university in the past must be reassessed and either written out of the script or have their character and achievements ripped to shreds.
The list also features Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and James Cowles Prichard, all of whom contributed in one way or another to ‘racial theories on human difference’. And do not get me started on former vice-chancellor Arthur James Balfour, who single-handedly messed up the Middle East to such an extent that Hamas felt obliged to cross the border on October 7, 2023 and launch attacks on Israel, which led to Israel’s war in Gaza. Incidentally, I say that as someone who has publicly criticised Israel’s actions in Gaza, but I also think calling the slaughter of more than 1,000 unarmed civilians ‘attacks’ is playing it down somewhat.
As a result of the Balfour Declaration, Israel comes in for some swingeing criticism in the report. The declaration led to ‘a century-long process of imperial and settler-colonial rule in Palestine, resulting today in one of the longest-standing colonial occupations and apartheid regimes in modern history’. No doubt which side of its bread the University of Edinburgh has decided to butter.
The whole thing started when staff from the Department of Offence Archaeology began digging around in the university’s legacies and endowments. Without being able to decipher precisely what this means, they discovered that ‘£30million (relative price worth), £202million (relative wage or income worth) or over £800million (relative output worth)’ of their money had come from sources related to slavery and colonialism. It also became apparent that the university’s anatomical museum had a few relics – skulls and things – of people of colour, hewn down on foreign battlefields and removed to Britain without permission. (One wonders whose permission they could have asked?)
For example, the investments used to fund the construction of Old College (1789-94) and the Medical School (1873-83) ‘can be traced to the profits of cultivating, producing, and selling colonial commodities – tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron, opium, to name a few’. All of this was in some way linked to the slave trade – which, in case the university senate has forgotten, we managed to stop. Little thanks we get for that.
The outcome? Apparently, ‘the University of Edinburgh was a haven for professors and alumni who developed theories of racial inferiority and white supremacism’. So here we have a university with an estimated £800million it clearly does not want, and a building constructed with ill-gotten gains that houses the vice-chancellor’s office. The solution seems simple: find some worthy causes in Africa and the Caribbean, give them the money, and turn Old College into a centre for migrants and refugees from our old colonies, which are doing so well these days.
Hmm . . . not quite. They will keep the money, spend it on their own projects and initiatives, and then virtue-signal that to the world. They will feel smug, and everyone will be happy.
The university conducted two ‘university-wide surveys that assessed both attitudes towards racism among the student and staff population and also experiences of racism among staff and students who identify as belonging to a racially or ethnically minoritised group’. You might imagine these surveys revealed that everyone was very happy with their lot, especially if they were of colour, came from an ethnic minority, or from another country or culture.
Surprise, surprise, there is plenty of racism and racial prejudice, and the university is determined to do something about it. Towards that end, it has published some of the most boring statistics you could possibly imagine, showing that staff who are not white are in the minority, and, well, that’s about it. As for doing something about it, unfortunately that can be achieved only by discriminating against perfectly qualified white candidates, and that would be racism . . . I think.
The enormous guilt trip on which the University of Edinburgh has embarked is to become ‘central to the educative mission of the University of Edinburgh’. Sounds like fun! The actions include establishing a ‘dedicated Palestine Studies Centre’. The mind boggles as to what will be on the curriculum. How about ‘Anti-Israeli Studies’, ‘Bomb-Making for Beginners’ and ‘Advanced Holocaust Management’?
I have great sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, among whom are many Christian brethren, and my tone may seem a tad sarcastic. But anyone who thinks that those running and attending a Palestine Studies Centre are going to sit around drinking coffee and discussing how we can all get along on the Gaza Strip is living in cloud cuckoo land. The place will become a centre of rampant anti-Semitism, infiltrated and influenced by whichever set of thugs is currently running the Palestinian territories. Does the vice-chancellor want that on his doorstep?
I would urge you to read the report for yourselves, but you would not thank me. I have only skimmed the surface here rather than plumbed the depths.
And so the University of Edinburgh marches boldly into the future, dragging behind it a sackful of guilt, an unreadable 130-page report, and a budget ring-fenced for performative remorse. Expect more centres, more apologies and more committees, all carefully calibrated to ensure nothing of real value is lost – except, perhaps, credibility.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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Thank you Roger for reading and interpreting this wonderful document on our behalf. In terms of economic benefit that must be hard to beat. The number of man-hours saved for the rest of us is almost incalculable.
Normally I would shrug my shoulders at this and look forward to hearing about how they all end up devouring themselves over time.
Sadly of course I can’t because as a tax payer I’m contributing to their costs in many ways and am on the hook for the unpaid student loans that will no doubt accrue from the useless “education” these modern day scammers offer.
In my late 70s now I’ll probably miss the inevitable explosion arising from all this BS but I fear for my children and grandchildren.