Edinburgh University is learning that there is a price to pay for going woke

David Hume Tower in Edinburgh was always an insult to the philosopher. The great man of the Scottish Enlightenment would have been horrified to have seen the concrete monstrosity erected and named after him in the 1960s. Looking at the building you do not think of the Enlightenment. More common impressions left are the stench of urine and despair. Thus had the authorities of the University of Edinburgh already insulted one of their finest sons.

Then in 2020, all dead white males came into the crossfires of a cultural revolutionary wave. Politicians, tradesmen, philosophers and others were all found guilty of the crimes of being dead, white and male. Unforgivable crimes, naturally. As a result statues were torn down, plaques removed and more. All because people from the past were found guilty of not thinking exactly as we do in the 2020s.

What made it worse was that the adults kept giving in. And nowhere did they give in faster than at the University of Edinburgh. David Hume’s work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.

I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Hume’s works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Hume’s collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.

But soon, searching for victims, the mob was after Hume, deemed him a racist and insisted his name be removed from the University of Edinburgh building. So it came to pass that the university authorities changed the building name to “40 George Square”. A name which is still far more poetic than the building in question.

And there it lay. Another victim of the latter-day culture war I described in my most recent book, The War on the West. But as I also pointed out there, these things can have unintended consequences. Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would be the easiest thing imaginable to spit on the memory of David Hume. Yet, as the Telegraph reported this week, there has in fact been a downside for them.

It turns out that in the wake of their auto-cancellation the University of Edinburgh saw a slump in donations. Indeed, the university lost almost £2million, including 24 donations and 12 legacy donations that have either been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” since the cancellation of Hume.

Personally, I am delighted to see this. David Hume is a figure that the university should take immense pride in. Naturally, working 250 years ago, he held some views that we do not hold today. Just as we doubtless hold views today that our successors will not hold in another 250 years.

But the point of institutions is not to judge the past and act as judge, jury and executioner over it. Nor is it to erase the past. The job of institutions is to preserve the past, educate the young about it and then pass that education along. In that process continuity is vital, so that a student today might realise that they could achieve even a portion of the heights of those who went before them. Judge a man on one footnote and “who should ‘scape whipping” (as Hamlet put it)?

So I am glad that the University of Edinburgh is getting a beating of its own because of its cowardly and ignorant cancellation. I hope other donors at other universities follow suit. Giving in to mobs, to mob pressure, or the insistences of the most ignorant in society are the precise things that universities should never do. Now at least another institution has learnt that the hard way.

If you are an institution and do not stand up for the past then there is no reason why anyone in the present should stand up for you.

Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would easy to spit on the memory of David Hume