Race Reports

In July 2025, the University of Edinburgh published a wide-ranging ‘Review of Race and History’ that attempts to confront its legacies of enslavement and colonialism. Four months earlier, the University of St Andrews had published a report laying out the ways in which it had participated in, supported and benefitted from British imperialism and colonialism between 1700–1900. These reports follow on the heels of the University of Glasgow’s 2018 investigation into its historical links with racial slavery and similar work undertaken by other universities in the UK. Both 2025 reports were commissioned in 2021, when universities – like many other public institutions in the West – were forced to examine their historic implication in slavery and colonialism in the face of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd the previous summer. These reports and investigations are the product of enormous amounts of labor undertaken in good faith by critical voices in the academy. And they might have looked like the honest reckonings with the past that they are intended to be, had they not emerged in a moment marked by extraordinarily callous institutional disregard for obligations arising out of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.  

Money is a major theme of both reports. The St Andrews report reveals that 46% of known individual donors in the period under consideration derived their wealth at least partly from activities that depended on British colonialism or empire, with 15% of them deriving their wealth partly from enslavement. One of the largest donors was Alexander Berry, in whose name an enormous bequest of £100,000 (£11.7 million in today’s money) was made in the 1890s, at a time when the entire government grant to all universities in Scotland was £42,000 annually. The Berry fortune derived from land in Australia that is now the subject of a successful Native Title claim by the South Coast People. The bequest to St Andrews necessitated the sale of large tracts of land, resulting in what the report euphemises as the ‘displacement of the local Indigenous community’ to Aboriginal reserves. Berry is known to have intimidated Aboriginal Australians with firearms and handcuffs, and to have engaged in the then alarmingly common practice of exhuming the remains of Aboriginal people and sending them to Edinburgh for ‘study’ in the pseudoscientific disciplines of craniology and phrenology.  

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What does it mean for the university to acknowledge the ‘displacement of indigenous people’ in the nineteenth century as a generative driver of its wealth at the same time as it exhibits a studied indifference or, worse, active hostility to those campaigning against the decimation of the indigenous people of Palestine in the genocide that has been ongoing since October 2023? Within weeks of the onset of the genocide an early facade of institutional neutrality, itself premised on a morally objectionable equation of the violence of the colonised and the coloniser, gave way to outright condemnation of Palestine solidarity activism. The condemnation focused especially on the student-elected Rector – a Black woman named Stella Maris – on account of her calling for a ceasefire. Maris was dismissed from the university’s governing body and stripped of her role as trustee, decisions that were eventually reversed on appeal to the university’s Chancellor – the former Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell. In May 2025, the Dundee Courier reported that the university had acted in this way to assuage the concerns of the Wolfson Foundation – a charity with close links to Israel – which had threatened to withhold a proposed £2 million donation out of concerns over Maris’s statement. Barring the occasional discreet humanitarian gesture, the university has remained unresponsive to political demands such as the call for boycott of Israeli universities and for divestment from companies complicit in Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide made in an open letter signed by 1 in 12 members of the university. If the university’s continued financial viability relies on making a world that is safe for settler colonialism, then the past is not such a foreign country.    

The contradictions between expressing contrition for the past while repeating its injustices are more explicitly laid bare in the Edinburgh report, with the University of Edinburgh’s greater size, wealth, and historical and political prominence also upping the stakes very considerably. The report estimates that the modern-day equivalent of the total amounts of slavery- and empire-linked money received by the university ranges from £30 million to just over £800 million, depending on the method by which such equivalence is calculated. It underscores the outsized role played by intellectuals associated with the university during the period of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment in the development of ideas of racial hierarchy and white supremacism. Most pointedly, given the global context in which the report appears, it investigates the university’s colonial connections to the Middle East and especially Palestine through the life and career of one of its longest serving Chancellors, Arthur Balfour. In his simultaneous capacity as British Foreign Secretary, Balfour’s infamous Declaration of 1917 ‘promised’ Palestine as a ‘national home’ for Jewish settlers, relegating Palestinians – named only as ‘non-Jewish communities’ – to a secondary status as holders of ‘civil and religious rights’. 

In a lengthy and prodigiously researched appendix to the report, Nicola Perugini and Shaira Vadasaria link past and present by highlighting the University of Edinburgh’s considerable implication in the Gaza genocide through its direct and indirect investments in companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM that provide the technological platforms for Israeli military surveillance and targeting of Palestinians, and others such as BlackRock that invest in arms companies. At nearly £25.5 million and alongside its significant research collaborations with firms producing lethal weapons, these links are so extensive that the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese recently singled out the University of Edinburgh as among those in the UK ‘most financially entangled’ with Israeli settler colonialism. The depth of the university’s historic and ongoing implication in the oppression of Palestine has fuelled one of the most impressive student and staff mobilisations in its history – one that has manifested in protests, sit-ins, walks-outs from graduation ceremonies, occupations, a long-running encampment and a thirty-three-day hunger strike. Among other things, the appendix archives the university management’s appalling record of delay and prevarication in its sporadic engagement with the demands of Palestine solidarity activists. At one point in negotiations in May 2024, management brandished the fact that it was undertaking a ‘comprehensive, academically-led review of Race and History’ to fend off demands for ceasefire statements, divestment and greater due diligence around research collaborations. Such discursive tactics call to mind Sara Ahmed’s wry observation that in much equalities work, ‘doing the document’ takes precedence over ‘doing the doing’.

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Reports around institutional complicity in empire and slavery have now been around for long enough to have come into their own as a performative institutional genre. The very fact that institutional leaders feel able to commission them betrays their view of empire as something safely removed from the present rather than as an ongoing enterprise in which one might be implicated willy nilly. But the contradiction between purporting to express contrition for an imperialism that is relegated to the past while remaining oblivious to one’s participation in the genocidal imperialism of the present suggests something more particular and peculiar about the institutional reckonings that have been undertaken in the febrile global moment bookended by Black Lives Matter and the genocide in Gaza. Either we are witnessing the operation of the ‘Palestine exception’ in which Palestinians remain exceptionally marginalised, relative even to other people of colour, on account of what Edward Said saw as their unique status as ‘victims of the victims’. Or Black lives still don’t matter. After all, what comfort can we expect the descendants of the enslaved and the Indigenous to take from apologies, land acknowledgements, and symbolic repatriations of ancestral remains and sacred objects, when these are performed by institutions mired in the ongoing annihilation of yet another racialised community?

Confronted with demands for social justice, universities respond in the currency they possess most abundantly, promising more and better scholarship as well as racially equitable access to the means of producing and consuming it. The St Andrews report resolves to support research into Indigenous, First Nations, colonial and postcolonial literatures and history, under the aegis of the Berry Chair of Literature and Human Rights. The Edinburgh report’s more wide-ranging recommendations include the establishment of a Research and Community Centre for the Study of Racisms, Colonialism and Anti-Black Violence as well as a Palestine Studies Centre. These are laudable ambitions. But we would be idealising universities if we regarded them as institutions singularly devoted to knowledge production while losing sight of how they are also death machines in their contemporary neoliberal incarnations as investment and property portfolios and laboratories of carceral violence. If that sounds histrionic, consider that the University of Sheffield – the leading UK university recipient of direct funding from arms manufacturers – was so proud of its contribution to the manufacturing of F-35 combat aircraft, that it showcased the project in its submission to the 2021 UK Research Excellence Framework, which awards funding to universities in proportion to the ‘impact’ that their work has had outside academia.

As the bodies pile up in Gaza, the imperative of throwing sand (or red paint) in the wheels of these death machines has never been more urgent. In his searing indictment of the dehumanisation of Palestinians, Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd reserves his harshest contempt for academics who stand idle ‘until the dust settles, then they will write books about what should have been.’ ‘The vultures’, he says, ‘will make sculptures out of our flesh.’