Shame should not be heritable

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now that faculties gorge on racial guilt as Cambridge dons once famously feasted on roasted swans, what was really inevitable is that a body christened ‘The Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement’ would find links to slavery.

Why, it must have frustrated the authors of the report released last week that their three-year inquiry didn’t manage to dredge up any evidence that the university ever directly owned slaves or plantations. Rather, it’s the money that was tainted; lucre having always passed through dirty hands somewhere along the line, there’s no such thing as clean money. Thus the ‘significant benefit’ Cambridge enjoyed from this discreditable practice came down to donations from companies and individual benefactors involved with slavery, as well as fees from students whose families ran plantations.

As Cambridge is not the only academic institution undergoing this handwringing self-examination, maybe it’s worth asking exactly what good the posturing exercise has accomplished. The same number of Africans were sold into forced labour as ever. The same suffering and injustice simply sit there in the past, as irretrievably and immutably as before.

The primary benefit of discovering the university has a smudge in its drawers is that its administrators get to feel better about themselves. That is, they get to feel better about themselves for feeling worse about themselves. But given that their predecessors spent that blood money long ago, we might sensibly question whether reports like this ever make the modern-day staff and faculty genuinely feel bad. I’ve never thought the whole concept of ‘liberal guilt’ quite stands up to scrutiny. Guilt is an unpleasant sensation. When I went too long without checking in with my elderly father, the feeling was sludgy and soiling. But ‘liberal guilt’ is a pleasure – a bundle of self-congratulation, preening sanctimony and moral superiority. As a rule, the inert glow of feeling-good-about-feeling-bad makes no real-world difference to anybody.

The other reason ‘liberal guilt’ doesn’t qualify as guilt proper is that purveyors of the liberal kind didn’t do anything wrong – of which they’re well aware. Professor Toope and his advisory group never crammed any Africans into deadly, filthy ships, put any black captives on an auction block or set them to work in sugarcane fields with no wages. For not only do Cambridge’s current employees not really feel bad about some tenuous for-want-of-a-nail connection to slavery; they shouldn’t feel bad. Because slavery is not their fault. We don’t emphasise this enough lately, but historical shame is not and should not be heritable. It’s hard enough taking responsibility for the lousy things we all do in the here and now without also taking on the sins of total strangers in the unalterable past.

In this instance, Cambridge does plan to do active penance. The report’s authors originally considered but dismissed paying reparations – which would have been quite a tall order, tracking down which Britons might be descended from slaves, who would necessarily have toiled in a different country, and somehow trying to make it up to them. Instead, a black artist will be commissioned to craft a tribute to black graduates. The university will intensify its outreach to African and Caribbean students. As only 1.7 per cent of Cambridge postgrads are black (although at 2.7 per cent, its proportion of black undergrads approaches the 3 per cent of the British population who are black), Cambridge will also establish multiple postgraduate scholarships exclusively for black Britons.

We should be rightly queasy about bursaries that specify the recipient’s race. All racial categories are vague and encompass a broad range of ethnicities, histories and economic circumstances. ‘Black students’ include the children of poor single mothers in Brixton and the offspring of wealthy Nigerian oil barons.

Recall that in 2019 Bryan Thwaites tried to donate £1.2 million to his alma maters, Dulwich and Winchester Colleges, towards scholarships for white working-class boys, the most educationally disadvantaged group in the UK, and he was turned down flat. Peter Lampl, the founder of the educational charity the Sutton Trust, called singling out a particular racial group ‘obnoxious’. Joe Spence, the head of Dulwich College, feared that accepting the gift as stipulated might land the school in court over racial discrimination. He told the Financial Times: ‘Every-one arrives at Dulwich not as a holder of a white working-class bursary, or because they are black, but because they passed our entrance test and have a right to be here on equal terms.’ Winchester College issued a statement asserting: ‘The school does not see how discrimination on grounds of a boy’s colour could ever be compatible with its values.’

Fair enough. But if we find bursaries reserved for poor white kids distasteful, then bursaries reserved for black kids of any economic status should seem even more so.

Clearly, Cambridge’s real contribution to slavery was, as Britons love to say, vanishingly small. In truth, had that advisory group failed to find any connection between their storied institution and slavery, the administration would have been crestfallen. These investigations are garment-rending theatre. They’re exercises in trendy rebranding: ‘We’re so good we know how bad we are.’

Lest you worry that this festival of sackcloth and ashes is coming to a close, Cambridge also promises to establish a ‘Legacies of Enslavement Research Centre’ that will carry on the work of the advisory group. Presumably this new entity will further comb ancient university records to locate a student from 1792 whose great-uncle’s second cousin knew someone whose best friend’s family had a live-in maid, who admittedly was paid, but not very much, according to the crumbling yellowed records, so she might just as well have been a slave. I guess all those recent graduates of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes have to get work somewhere.

Before we go: the much-mourned Hilary Mantel was not only an exceptional writer whose work will endure if anyone’s does, but she was also that rarity in literary circles – a wonderful person.