Two leading academics have rounded on a “craven” decision by Edinburgh University to reject one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers with calls for the principal to “hang his head in shame”.
The university’s David Hume Tower, which celebrated the philosopher, historian and giant of the Scottish Enlightenment, will now be known as 40 George Square because Hume made racist statements 300 years ago.
A petition calling for his name to be removed from the building, which came in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, attracted fewer than 2,000 signatures but was sufficient to persuade university leaders to act.
A university spokesman said it was an interim decision taken because of the sensitivities around asking students to use a building named after an 18th-century philosopher “whose
