MONUMENT CONTROVERSY DEPT./
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
Until now, LA’s own USC was leading the View’s handicap of cowardly, stupid university administrations, with its hair-trigger firing-not-firing-but destroying-okay-call-it-firing of Prof. Greg Patton https://reason.com/2020/09/03/usc-greg-patton-chinese-word-offended-students/
(USC had taken the lead from Philly’s own University of the Arts, the plucky up-and-comer in the academic world, its rise in prestige led almost entirely by the provocative but brilliant star professor Camille Paglia, whom some students tried to fire and came near to succeeding: https://www.inquirer.com/news/camille-paglia-u-arts-professor-philadelphia-protest-petition-transgender-survivors-sexual-assault-david-yager-20190415.html
Woo hoo, though, this one hits home for they’re stripping the name off David Hume Tower, the same very awful and ghastly building in which I did, I think, two out of my three mind-shattering full-year classes: Early American Social, and British Empire History.
It would be fair to say that I started getting real woke in that wonderful, very awful and ghastly rain-smeared building, studying the erection of the apparatus American slavery, and the partition of Africa, among students of all races and from all countries of the globe and all political persuasions: Marxists and Anti-Colonialists and Punks and Anarchists and go-go capitalists, World Government types, Nigerians, Indians, a Lord or two, and plenty of slick and smug Thatcherite Tories. Nobody shy about any of it, either, though (usually) polite and eager to share what they know.
Flash forward, and today another group of nobody adolescents, with a brief from no one, acting in anonymity and under the impetus of momentary emotional promptings of anguish and pain in a band-wagon teen-idol flashmob, “feelings” which anybody just has to take it for granted are even appropriate or genuine — “click I Like This, and post to all your friends”– has gotten for itself a meaningless blip of publicity for the “pain” history causes them, though hardly relief from it, by canceling from Edinburgh memory, and striking from every pillar and pylon in the home town he helped put on the world intellectual map, this man, a man whose work they will never read:
Generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers to write in English, David Hume (1711–1776) was also well known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works—A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)—remain widely and deeply influential. Although Hume’s more conservative contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” and Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume “caused the scales to fall” from his eyes. Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading him reflect both the richness of their sources and the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a thoroughgoing exponent of philosophical naturalism, as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, and as the inspiration for several of the most significant types of ethical theory developed in contemporary moral philosophy.
— plato.stanford.edu The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Fuck ’em, and I mean the administrators. It was their dishonor to put a shining name on such a grotty, windswept brutalism in the first place: the ugliest building by far in the George Square neighborhood, or indeed the whole University.
David Hume was only lightly touched on in my studies; and God, did I have plenty to read already. But as a break from the hardcore, and inspired by the building’s name, and knowing what he meant to the University and the town and Scotland and the world, I specifically took out his books from the library that year and read them, rattle-rattle, on the trains as I explored the country. I am not the poorer for it. From today forward, Edinburgh history students can be assumed to be dumber than I; and here I thought we were going the other way. Is that what they’re at college for? Feh.
The Valley Village View 