How the University of Edinburgh helped create scientific racism

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the 400-year-old University of Edinburgh confronts its dark past.

0:24We're standing on Colton Hill in the east end of Edinburgh, which is one of the most famous locations in the city. and what we can see from here is Edinburgh's iconic skyline. And right in front of us is a huge monument to Dougal Stewart, one of Edinburgh's most famous moral philosophers. A few weeks ago, The Guardian Scotland editor Severin Carroll took our producer Courtney Youssef to see one of Edinburgh's most iconic monuments. It almost looks like it's a shrine. It's got Greek-style Corinthian columns, it's got an urn in the centre of it And it's actually, funnily enough, it's also displaying quite a handsome array of weeds growing through the cracks.

1:02It's something which everybody in the city will recognise immediately because it's so present and so dominant when you're in this part of the city. Can you think of a better place to have a monument? Probably not. He was one of the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, developing new theories around democracy and the rights of people. he was lauded at the time, hence the monument. But now Dougal Stewart and many of his contemporaries at the university are being re-evaluated, what they actually taught at Edinburgh and the sorts of misleading, troubling and often racist views that they were formulating and establishing as central to liberal thought at the time.

1:47The university has released a shocking report into its own history, one that delves into its connections to slavery, to empire, and even the creation of the state of Israel.

2:02Now serious questions are being asked about how the centuries-old institution should respond. The university's report, because of its depth and its breadth, will actually be quite a shock, I think, to many people in the city. It will also potentially make the city start to re-evaluate the way in which it sells itself to the world. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, how the University of Edinburgh helped create scientific racism.

2:33Severin Carroll, you're The Guardian Scotland editor, and you've written exclusively on this eye-watering report from Edinburgh University. First of all, can you tell me what did the report propose to look at and how did it come about? Well, the report was originally commissioned largely because the student and staff body were highly agitated by the death of George Floyd at the Black Lives Matter campaign, which emerged. but also universities in the UK were already beginning to look very closely at their historic associations with transatlantic slavery, with colonialism and with empire, largely because of a maturing understanding amongst British historians about the fact that the UK really hadn't properly examined its involvement in complicity.

3:18But also there was a groundbreaking report published by the University of Glasgow in 2018, which became the first UK university to properly investigate how much money the university itself had gathered from wealthy benefactors who were sugar merchants, tobacco merchants in Glasgow and central Scotland who had benefited enormously from their entanglements with the plantation economy. And so what are its key findings? In the UK, the classic picture about Britain's entanglement with the Atlantic slave trade and with the plantation economy were the merchants and ship owners in cities like Liverpool and Bristol who were actually investing in and running the ships that were transporting millions of people, enslaved people, from Africa over to the Caribbean and to the Americas.

4:07What Edinburgh University was doing was it was producing the doctors who were graduating and then were then placed on these slave ships or even the lawyers and the administrators of the plantations of the sugar, of the tobacco, of the cotton that was being grown on the backs of millions and millions of enslaved people. There was one point in Liverpool that 40 % of the ship's doctors that were being employed were educated at Edinburgh. But what is quite odd at Edinburgh was there were contradictions between the position that some of its most famous moral philosophers took around the morality of slavery and what they actually taught about racial difference about the human race.

4:54So, for instance, there is one particular very significant, even totemic figure in Edinburgh's history, a moral philosopher called Professor Dougal Stewart, who's regarded as one of the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. And this is Dougal Stewart, whose monument you described earlier. Yes. Now, Dougal Stewart and his predecessor, Adam Ferguson, were avowed critics of enslavement. They were pro-abolition. Right. But at the same time, the researchers have established by looking at all the original student notes that date back to 1792, which established that Dougal Stewart in particular and Adam Ferguson were teaching their students racist theories about a hierarchy of intelligence in the human species, which placed white Europeans at the top of that hierarchy and black Africans at the bottom.

5:47Now, he was making these arguments and unfolding all these arguments while many Edinburgh students were very, very passionately involved in huge disputes, rows and arguments on campus in the 1790s and going into the early 1800s for and against abolitionism. At the same time, there were also other academics at Edinburgh who were arguing that actually slavery had its place, that enslavement was actually effectively part of a natural order. And indeed, there were some donors to the university who would passionately argue that slavery was necessary. And these are the people that were providing money to the university.

6:25The university at the time was very happy to accept. Wow, it's such a complex picture, isn't it, when you've got professors essentially advocating white supremacy under the cover of also being quite progressive and liberal. It's quite a confusing picture that's revealed. Yes. And what that does, and this is one of the arguments that the report's authors make very, very forcibly, is they say this raises challenging questions about what's widely known as the Scottish Enlightenment, the point at which Edinburgh in particular became central to the creation and development of very modern ideas about what we now regard as being human rights, notions around liberalism, around moral codes.

7:09What people now have to grapple with is that Dougal Stewart in particular and Ferguson were at the same time arguing that humans existed on a sort of biological and genetic spectrum, which is quite challenging. And that, what you've described there, that is what is now understood as scientific racism. Sev, you also mentioned that the university was happy to accept money from former students who were involved in enslavement. What did that mean? At a bare minimum, the university had raised what would be a modern-day equivalent of£30 million, or some people would estimate it's as high as 845 million pounds directly from donors, benefactors and philanthropists who had made the money from the transatlantic slave trade, from the plantation economy and through colonialism.

8:01There were people who were tasked with actually writing letters and networking in the plantations of Jamaica or in big cities in India or indeed even in London. It was a deliberate effort to get money from ex-students who they knew were making very good livings serving as doctors and lawyers on plantations using enslaved labour across the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere. Well, tell me more about the individuals involved here. Who were these former students? For the authors of the Edinburgh University Report, the arc which joins those moral philosophers who were teaching racist theories about humanity and human evolution through to the late empire and colonial period can be most clearly drawn by somebody such as Dr.

8:52Robert Halliday Gunning. Now, Gunning was an Edinburgh University medical student in the early 1800s and then went off to make what became a quite significant fortune in Brazil. By the time Gunning arrived in Brazil, the UK had already outlawed slavery. Technically, that made it illegal for any Briton themselves to be involved with enslaving people or profiting from enslaved people. Nonetheless, he made his fortune working for Brazilian gold mining enterprises that explicitly used enslaved miners to mine the gold. Journalists visited him and believed that as far as they were concerned, he himself owned between 30 and 40 enslaved people.

9:34Now, Gunning denied this, but nonetheless, the allegation stuck. By the time he started to consider retirement, he donated what it would be in modern terms, tens of millions of pounds of his wealth, including giving money to Edinburgh University for a significant number of prizes for medals, for lectures and bequests that he himself deliberately named after some of Edinburgh's most famous medics. Now, the university, it emerges, still has some of Gunning's money. One of the researchers involved in the study, Dr Simon Buck, has calculated that at least that money is worth£5.4 million today, and the university still hands out several very prestigious medals and awards lectures issued by the School of Divinity.

10:26But now there's a big question that has to be asked about whether that money should be repurposed. And I guess it shows just how incredibly complex this picture is, because whether or not Gunning had owned enslaved people, the fact that he was a doctor whose vocation is to help people and yet profited from the brutalisation and harm, it's just, it's extraordinary.

10:56To explore how the findings of the report were landing in the city of Edinburgh itself, Courtney spoke with two local teenagers involved in a theatre group that focuses on social issues, Theatre of the Oppressed Scotland, who are just starting to think about applying for university. Just to begin with, could you please introduce yourselves? Hello, I'm Denzel. I am 16 years old. I am Usman and I'm 15 years old. When you were learning about slavery in school, what was that experience like? It was quite a sensitive topic. The teacher did give out warnings prior. The thing is, when the teacher's ever talking about the punishments or the hardship black people went through, you kind of feel it in your chest, sitting as a black student, and that's when you start to feel apart from all the other kids.

11:47In that moment, you just start to see people looking at you so it's quite hard learning about it because it sounds traumatic what they had to go through i learned that i think two years ago so if that process kind of made you feel uncomfortable if i could say that are you glad that you did learn about it at school or would you rather that hadn't happened no i think the uncomfortableness comes from actually knowing what happened and thinking that that could have been me if I was born at the wrong time. But at the same time, you know, it's good to know what happened because you don't want to be misinformed about your past.

12:28And, yeah, it's always good to know about your culture. I was there this morning up by that Dugold Stewart memorial. Do you know it? I've seen a few memorials up there. Is that one of the pillars? Yeah. OK, yeah, I've seen that, yeah. Well, we were there this morning because that guy, Dugold Stewart, it was a big deal in the university. He was actually teaching people about a kind of supposed hierarchy of races and they were then going out becoming doctors, lawyers, traders in the British Empire with that in their mind. What do you make of history like that or finding out that that memorial is about someone like that?

13:07When you like think about it it's quite like a dark topic kind of like leaves a hole inside of you just because it kind of reminds you that there was a time when people of your kind were hated. There's a lot of statues we see now commemorating big influential men like in old Scotland but then when you find out they've done things like racist especially in the time where racism was such a big thing and such so common it's not really that surprising. So it's not like a bubbles bursting in your idea of the city? not really because there's a lot of statues there's a lot of history in the city it's very historic city so if you have that in the back of your mind that there's going to be influence from slavery then you know when you're looking at these things well in a way what's interesting about what the university has uncovered is that the idea that people were more racist in the past I guess was a thing, but in a way it was because of what they were teaching at places like this, those ideas were spreading.

14:12Does that change your idea of what racism is at all? Yeah, at first I thought it was like a behaviour, but then as you get older you start to realise like it can be systematic as well and it can be like engraved in someone from young. So yeah, it's just all about influence and who's teaching it and stuff like that.

14:41It's a beautiful city. We really love the country. And it's a lot less tumultuous than the United States at the moment. Sev, you interviewed Professor Tommy Curry to tell a key part of this story. Can you tell me more about who he is and his role in producing this report? Professor Curry is a really interesting individual. He is the first ever professor of philosophy at Edinburgh in its 450-year history who is Black. One of the issues that Tommy foregrounds in his way he describes the work that he's done and why it's important for him is the fact that he was born in Louisiana soon after the formal end of segregation from the Jim Crow era in the United States.

15:25And in the mid-1960s, only around 1 % of American university professors were black. And to his shock, he's discovered, and it's clear from the university's own inquiries, that less than 1 % of Edinburgh University's staff today are black. Wow, that's shocking. He says, how is it that a country which holds itself up as a beacon of enlightenment, of anti-racism, of inclusion, and of liberalism has exactly the same issue with employing Black academics as a country which was openly and legally embedding racism and segregation in the way it operated. Compared to other elite UK universities, Edna performs very, very badly when it comes to employing and supporting and hiring Black staff and bringing in Black students.

16:17And for a world-facing institution trying to attract the brightest and the best, it is a case of walking the walk rather than just talking the talk, right? And that's exactly what he says. Curry's argument is that if Edinburgh acknowledges and accepts the fact that it was so enmeshed in creating these theories of white supremacy and then pushing those theories out around the world, then the one thing the university could do now is also become the beacon for addressing and repairing the damage that has been caused by those behaviours, by those philosophies 250 years ago. In my experience in the UK, white Brits seem to believe that you can isolate the horror and history of slavery to ignorant individuals.

17:08It's not about people being erroneous in their thinking. It is about how people utilize what they thought was the pinnacle of intellectual discovery about race and racial difference in human variation to support industry, to build capital and to sustain their legacies as the top institutions and world leading knowledge hubs. This is an actual injury and harm. This is dehumanization. And the University of Edinburgh was in the business of that for well over two centuries. It's interesting because last year we ran an episode on Today in Focus in which someone went undercover within contemporary scientific racism networks to show just how these bogus ideas are still very much alive and being promoted through significant financial backing.

17:56I guess what might be difficult for people to understand is that Edinburgh is often considered the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, as you've told us, Sev, a site where ideas of liberalism and freedom and rights were first formulated. How does Professor Currie square that, sitting alongside these notions of scientific racism? We know that many of the ideas that were being pursued and investigated and supported at Edinburgh around racial superiority, white supremacist ideas, are still current. They're still very topical. And in fact, Edinburgh University in the 1990s was a home to Dr Chris Brand, who became notorious for publishing very similar theories and ideas in a book that had to be withdrawn and pulped.

18:40His lectures caused enormous controversy on campus. So for Professor Currie, who is a specialist in critical race theory, one of the biggest questions which is going to have to be grappled with at Edinburgh is whether or not, in fact, the theories which emerged out of the Scottish Enlightenment, Western notions of liberalism, of human rights, and so on, are themselves the problem. That there are other philosophies and ways of thinking which emerge from other parts of the world that propose different approaches. You say that your white humanism is good enough to suffice for everyone else, even though it murdered, created genocides, enslaved, colonized, deprived, starved, raped, sodomized groups of oppressed men and women.

19:25Maybe those oppressed people and former colonized people don't want your morality and your humanism. You see, that question, the question that where white thinkers and contemporary white academics can't imagine that anyone would ever reject their morality or their humanity or their systems of government and society. That's the white supremacy. The question that we have to ask is, do we continue a trajectory where our character, our identity as a university is built around the exclusion of African knowledge, of Black knowledge, of Asian knowledge, of Indigenous knowledge, etc., etc., where we're forced to depend only on the minds of white people to solve the greatest problems that's confronting humanity in the 21st century?

20:08Or do we change course where the University of Edinburgh no longer has to lean on its legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment, but offers not only a more inclusive, but a more deliberately world position on world knowledge? Sev, when it comes to the British Empire and slavery, it isn't just the Atlantic or India that Edinburgh was connected to. These incubational ideas that were formed at the university, they also had an impact in the Middle East. And can you tell me about that? One of the most challenging findings to come out of this review is the critique of the conduct and the actions and the behaviour of one of Edinburgh's longest-serving chancellors, Arthur Balfour, who was several points in his very long political career, both the UK's Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.

20:58Balfour had the ceremonial role of being university chancellor for the best part of 30 years, during which period he was the author of what's known as the Balfour Declaration, the UK government-inspired proposition that the Jewish people had an inalienable right to set up a Jewish home in Palestine. One of the arguments made very strongly in the report that deals with Balfour is that Balfour himself was actually profoundly racist. He was a supporter of eugenics. He was somebody that believed that whites were naturally and innately superior, and he believed that there was, in a sense, a racial hierarchy in the human race, ideas that had very, very close echoes to some of the theories that were being promulgated at the university in the late 1700s in the early 1800s.

21:52And this, for them, is a profoundly important finding. As researchers, we feel that it's important to discuss these issues. But as we know, anything that's said on this matter, regardless of its nuance, its historical accuracy, and its carefulness, will be reduced and pigeonholed into a political talking point for or against one side or the other. That's the unfortunate position that we're in. We're knowledgeable of it. But that's just, unfortunately, the circumstances of the time that we find ourselves. What's important to take away is what Balfour did, his views and his doctrines, and how that fits within the lexis of colonialism and dehumanization against a certain group of people.

22:41In high school, I started to get my hair braided, and I started to see like people use being African as an insult like saying oh that's so African that haircut is so African and I started to realize what's wrong with being African you know I mean then there's this idea that's been pushed from a long time ago that is still there today see people like insulting just the littlest things like just how your hair is how you dress and just how your style is it's just because of who you are. I'm sorry to hear about those experiences in that way do you see the link between what might have been taught at this university and what you guys are having to experience in the classroom does that feel like part of the same process or do they feel slightly different?

23:31They could be connected because obviously he lived around hundreds of years ago, right? So, like, his influence of teaching young kids about this race being better than this one may not seem like it affects us now, but in the long run, it could, because obviously him teaching those kids about the ideals, they adopt those ideals and keep it with them for the rest of their life. So they teach their kids that and they pass that on. And maybe it doesn't become as intense as it used to be, but it's still, like, buried deep in there. It's like a cycle. Yeah. and just kind of want to get your sense of this university is it something that you've ever thought about like maybe i would go there uh yeah i've looked into going into this university you know when you're looking at unis you won't really know the background of like what the philosophers taught a few hundred years ago but hearing it now you know it does kind of like play on your mind but no I think as long as the lecturers and the authorities here know and have processes in place for racism I think living in the present it should be okay but you know the ideas will still be there.

24:44I mean just to build on that what would you like to see the university do now that it's kind of uncovered this history? Mostly just opening it to the public but but not trying to glorify it or maybe just showing that we've moved past that and we're showing diversity and having better ideals to teach to the children who come here to learn. I feel that that will build more trust in parents and kids wanting to apply to this uni. So I believe it's a very good thing that they've explored their history and have let everybody know about it. Yeah, I just second what you said there. I think he's spot on.

25:24coming up now the findings are clear what is the head of the university promising to do

25:41well sev the report deconized transformations it didn't just analyze university over time but it also suggested ways of obtaining a form of reparative justice. What would that look like? What did it suggest? The reparative justice recommendations were overseen by Dr Nikki Frith, who's the co-chair. She's one of the university's specialists on reparative justice. They held workshops and seminars and consulted with ethnically minoritized communities, descendants of the people who in fact themselves were enslaved. The point that they make is that rather than do what other institutions like Glasgow have done, which was to write, in part, checks that would be comparable to the amount of money that was raised, that they want to see something much more fundamental.

26:27And at the heart of that would be a new centre, which they say would be a focus for very, very deliberate inquiry and research into areas around racism, anti-Black violence, and colonialism, and so on. They also want the universities to start providing many more scholarships for Black and ethnically minoritized students, something that the university, I believe, is already committed to doing. They also want to see the university spend money dedicated to supporting Palestinian academics and Palestinian studies. They want to see the university make much greater effort and succeed in hiring Black academics and Black staff addressing this extraordinary imbalance in the demographic makeup of the university.

27:15They are very concerned that the university doesn't just accept the historical findings, but acts on those findings today, and in their words, reverses the impact that all of those very problematic and difficult teachings the university was at the centre of pushing out 250 years ago. So Sev, as you describe, a really robust, significant list of recommendations. You met with the university principal, Professor Sir Peter Matheson. What impression did you get from him about how seriously he takes this report? Peter Matheson said he himself found it deeply shocking and really discomforting. And I think it is shocking.

27:56And the idea that the medical profession, which A, it's my own profession, but B, it's also a profession that you'd like to believe is doing its best for the human race. Actually, some of the early practices and some of the early teachings were deeply shocking. So yes, a lot of it shocked me. But I think the bits about the medical and medical-related teaching is probably the bit that I found most uncomfortable. One of the things he said was that the university could not afford, and it would be wrong, to have a selective memory and just to celebrate its achievements without accepting also that it had been responsible for significant errors as well.