Cancelling Huxley

SIR – A committee charged with investigating Imperial College’s past has accused Thomas Henry Huxley of “scientific racism” and proposes that his name be removed from a building and his bust from its lobby. This accusation is, on the historical evidence, false.

Huxley was an ardent abolitionist who fought the virulent pro-slavery scientific racism of his day and publicly welcomed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. Early in his career, it is true, he believed in a hierarchy of races, but as he aged he became sceptical of racial stereotypes.

From childhood poverty, Huxley rose on merit to become president of the Royal Society and a Privy Counsellor. “Darwin’s Bulldog”, he fought for the theory of evolution, and first demonstrated our evolutionary descent from an ape-like ancestor.

He believed that everyone should have a scientific education, so he reformed London’s schools, was a principal of a working men’s college, wrote volumes of journalism, gave lectures for working people and opened his classes to women.

He brought science to government, serving on eight royal commissions. In the words of his biographer, he transformed higher scientific education “from a gentleman’s occupation into a profession”.

He was instrumental in founding the Royal College of Science, later Imperial College, the very institution that now seeks to disown him.

Huxley’s early belief in a hierarchy of races is not ours. But, for his scientific accomplishments, his conviction that all men and women should be judged on their merits, his civic-mindedness, and the reforming zeal he brought to British science and education, we remain in his debt. For these reasons we think his name should stay on Imperial’s walls. Professor Armand M Leroi

Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London Professor Alice Roberts

School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham Professor Richard Dawkins

Department of Zoology, University of Oxford Sir Paul Nurse

The Francis Crick Institute and 36 others; see telegraph.co.uk