https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/03/edinburgh-universitys-war-on-the-enlightenment/
Few events have done more for human freedom and prosperity than the rise of secularism, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Scotland, and in particular its universities, was pivotal in their incubation and eventual flourishing. This period, beginning in the mid-18th century and known as the Scottish Enlightenment, was once considered to be a key achievement of civilisation, a hinge that allowed the history of the West to swing in a more liberal direction. But according to a new report commissioned by Edinburgh University, arguably the epicentre of this movement, this period is supposedly nothing to celebrate.
Apparently, the Scottish Enlightenment and Edinburgh University, in particular, were instead wellsprings of racism. Or, in the words of the report – co-authored by US academic Tommy J Curry – Edinburgh was a ‘haven’ for white supremacy. In particular, it blames the university for the discredited discipline of phrenology and it claims it played an ‘outsized role in developing racial pseudosciences’.
These accusations are levelled at the university in Decolonised Transformations, a report published this month that was commissioned by Edinburgh in 2021 in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Curry – a philosophy professor at Edinburgh, who lists critical race theory as his speciality – appears to have clutched at every conceivable straw to justify his findings and to taint his university.
One of the report’s prime targets is 18th-century philosopher David Hume, initially a student and later a librarian at Edinburgh. Despite Hume’s published works exceeding 5,000 pages, the report focusses on a solitary footnote from 1753 in which he described ‘Negroes’ as ‘inferior to whites’. It is undoubtedly an unpleasant comment, but it is hardly proof that Hume contributed to the ‘intellectual justification’ for ‘transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of African people’, as the report wants us to believe.
The report goes on to claim Edinburgh played a ‘central role’ in promulgating the theory of phrenology. But again, the evidence it provides for this claim is distinctly threadbare. It appears to rely almost solely on the presence of two skulls in the university’s Anatomical Museum, which belonged to half-Barbadian students at Edinburgh in the 19th century. The report said it can ‘be assumed’ the students’ status as ‘mullato’ (of mixed white and black ancestry) ‘is what aroused interest’ in the skulls at the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. Well, perhaps it was. But it doesn’t exactly prove the university was ‘central’ in ‘assert[ing] the existence of the hierarchy of human races’, as the report claims.
In what must have been a moment of true desperation, the report turns its attention to James Sutherland, Edinburgh’s first professor of botany. After reading the heading, ‘Research Finding 3’ alongside ‘Empire’ and ‘Enslavement’, one might expect to discover that this quiet plant enthusiast had some sort of connection to the slave trade. Instead, we learn that his position was merely at the head of a ‘global network of botanisers’ who acquired seeds from the West Indies. We are left to infer that this is an unforgivable sin that we should still be atoning for, more than 300 years after his death. If only there were a statue of Sutherland to smear in red paint.
Curry’s determination to discredit his university doesn’t stop at 17th-century botany. In what is no doubt news to Israelis and Palestinians, Curry’s report also gives Edinburgh University a leading role in the current Gaza war, and the many conflicts preceding it. The basis for this imperceptibly tenuous link is the fact that Arthur Balfour, who in 1917 signed the Balfour Declaration in support of the creation of the Jewish State, was also chancellor of Edinburgh University. To atone for these supposed past sins and its alleged ‘ongoing entanglement’ with the war today, Curry suggests the university should repudiate its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, and create a dedicated ‘Palestine Studies Centre’ while it’s at it.
