Imperial College told to remove bust of slavery abolitionist because …
archived 27 Oct 2021 14:04:04 UTC
University could also rename buildings as it seeks to ‘confront, not cover up, uncomfortable or awkward aspects of our past’
By Ewan Somerville
Imperial College London has been told to remove a bust of slavery abolitionist Thomas Henry Huxley because he “might now be called racist”, following a review into colonial links.
An independent history group for the Russell Group university has recommended that a bust of the renowned 19th century biologist, dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog”, be taken down and the Huxley Building on campus renamed.
The group of 21 academics was launched in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests last year to address Imperial’s “links to the British Empire” and build a “fully inclusive organisation”.
Its final report, published on Tuesday, said that three buildings and lecture rooms named after influential figures should be changed, along with the removal or redesign of two statues.
One is the Huxley building and a sculpture honouring the anthropologist Huxley, who helped form Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and first suggested that birds may be closely related to dinosaurs.
Huxley was a vocal slave abolitionist, but the Imperial report said his paper, Emancipation - Black and White, “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence” which helped feed ideas around eugenics, which “falls far short of Imperial’s modern values”.
The group, chaired by Nilay Shah, a professor of process systems engineering at Imperial, added that his theories “might now be called ‘racist’ in as much as he used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his attempt to understand their origins in his studies of human evolution”.
As a result, the report said the “bust of Huxley should be moved from the building for preservation with this historical context to College archives and the building should be renamed”.
Imperial’s provost, Ian Walmsley, said the university would “confront, not cover up, uncomfortable or awkward aspects of our past” and it was “very much not a ‘cancel culture’ approach”.
Students will be consulted on any changes ahead of managers deciding on any actions to be taken.
The report also said the Beit Hall and Beit Quad should be renamed because these benefactors to the college, Alfred and Otto Beit, gained their fortune from diamond and gold mining in South Africa.
In addition, the two statues in front of the college’s Grade II listed Royal School of Mines building of Beit and Julius Wernher are named for removal, an added plaque for context or an artist redesign due to their “compromised/discriminatory beliefs and activities”.
Lecture theatres in the Hamilton Building at Silwood Park named after prominent geneticists such as William Donald Hamilton, Ronald Fisher and John Burdon Sanderson Haldane are also recommended for renaming because of links to eugenics.
The report said that if a building or room is renamed then the reason should be publicly explained via a plaque or a QR code, which can be scanned on a mobile phone.
It said the process of renaming buildings should be seen not as extraordinary but a periodic event that carefully considers “concerns associated with the namesake’s teachings, views, behaviour, etc”.
The group of academics also backed the idea of creating a new museum or “interpretation space” to house subjects and objects removed from other sites on campus with organised tours to discuss the related historical issues.
Alice Gast, Imperial’s president, said: “While we cannot change history, we can find ways to clarify what it means, learn lessons from it, and ensure that we are not perpetuating legacies that we find abhorrent.
“We stand for openness, transparency and freedom of speech – and that will define this dialogue.”
