Old Faces in New Frames

The past, the present, and our college portraits

Dr Leif Dixon

It must be a confusing time to be a portrait or a statute. For decades you sat there, largely ignored, just part of the metaphorical furniture. And yet today your existence is either a profound affront to all modern values, or conversely your removal from public view would represent the end of civilisation as we know it. It is no less confusing to be a watcher of these historical representations. The Victorian scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley – long lauded as a progressive advocate of evolution, secularism, and women’s education – has been publicly disassociated from a London university building because he was about as racist as most other Victorian academics. Four protestors have just been acquitted for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston – an action which, they cleverly argued, has actually increased its historical and monetary value. And yet Rhodes still stands, larger than life; and yet is now accompanied by a tiny plaque describing him as a ‘committed colonialist.’ Compromises are sometimes good. And sometimes not.

When a professional historian thinks that a person in the past is not as significant as was once thought, the result is that they stop being written about. By an osmosis of scholarly neglect, they simply recede from view. But it is not so easy with historical commemorations because they are already here, demanding to be seen in a way that books never demand to be read. They therefore create a pointed cultural problem for us because inaction represents a value judgement and decision in itself. To actively remove these representations of (or lightning rods to) historical values and narratives that we may now find offensive or simply no longer relevant, risks charges of historical vandalism. To stick with them, however, prompts the accusation that we are still celebrating things that we now know to be sexist or racist. There are no easy solutions.

Along with several colleagues – most prominently Drs Chris Joynes and Kate Kirkpatrick – I’ve been asked to help us to review our portraits and, more to the point, to help us to achieve a shared framework for thinking about what is and isn’t appropriate for historical commemorations in the future. Unfortunately, though, the wider cultural debate about these issues has become polarised. Two extremes, in particular, need to be challenged.

... the past has always been moulded by the present: that is simply how history is made.

The first error is to say that the present has an automatic obligation to preserve the past, that we cannot impose our values on it, and so whatever is done should never be undone. This argument is fundamentally flawed in three ways. One, no past society to my knowledge has ever done this: the present continually re-makes the past – it cannot help itself. Even societies which have spent a very long time apparently idolising the same historical figure, event or era can be found, on closer inspection, to be emphasising, forgetting, and re-writing different parts of the story as they go along. Second, I actually have no idea how this continuity argument is supposed to work in practice – do new things get added but nothing ever taken down? Does a 4th rate portrait have to stay in a gallery even if new and exciting artists could make better use of the wall space? Was it wrong for Iraqis to topple the statue of Saddam Hussain in 2003? Are we simply supposed to become a society of history hoarders? Third, professional historians simply do not engage with the past in this way. We make judgements about the significance of things all the time. We also do not study the past wholly on its own terms – the reason that historical approaches change is that our study represents a mediation between the realities of the past and the values of the present. This is why histories of non-elite, non-male, and non-white people are written so abundantly today, but were not written by the – equally good – historians of a century ago. In sum, the argument that historical commemorations must be eternal strikes me as so historically illiterate that it seems primarily to serve as a smoke-screen for culture-war-making against ‘woke’ opinion.

The opposite view is that we should give commemoration space to nothing that disagrees with our current values. My concern is that the admirable moral concerns which underlie this argument are offset by a determination to turn the historical past into a set of abstract ‘universal’ values, uprooted from their original contexts, designed solely to serve present agendas. If historical figures are simply discarded because they shared the social values of an age that we now find distasteful, then how can we hope to tangle with the complexities of our own day? And where does this search for moral purity end? Can any potential role model survive a quest for perfection? And how would we like thoughtful, morally-conscious people in the future to judge us? Would we want them to learn nothing positive from us as they wrestled with the complex similarities and differences between their worldviews and ours?

Clearly then, this is an issue that demands a nuanced response. But above all it does require a response: it simply is not justifiable to let portraits hang just because that’s what they’ve always done. In my view, we should keep the following guiding principles at the centre of our thinking: Consultation. The College’s portraits belong to all of us. We have already conducted some surveys among the JCR and MCR communities, but we want to hear from everyone who has a view. We are currently thinking about how best to engage with all parts of our community. Clarity. What are our historical commemorations for? Are they more like museum pieces which serve as a neutral, if incomplete, record of our college’s heritage, or are they things which should be expected to interact more directly with the present, for instance to inspire or to create a sense of belonging? Education. As a centre of learning, the very least that we can expect is to be given important information upon which to base our own judgements. Every historical commemoration in college, without exception, should carry some basic biographical information: and I would argue that more is better than less. Accountability. Every contextual plaque should also present a reason why that person is being commemorated. It doesn’t have to be a reason that everybody agrees with, but there must be an accountability so that in the future it is possible for decisions to be revisited if the reason given simply ceases to be a good one. Empathy. This is both about listening and imagining. We need to listen to those who stand in different places from us, and to think about why their view might differ from ours. This also goes from the present into the past. We need to try to consider things from the perspective of the historical subject we’re discussing. What was the relationship between their worldview and that of the culture from which they stemmed? And not only ‘what did they do?’, but ‘why did they do it?’ What power did they have (or lack), and what possibilities were open to them? The future. As a historian I’m always going to struggle with the idea that less history is a good thing: often there is too much focus on what should be stripped away, but much less on what should stand in its place. I would like to re-frame this debate therefore, to focus on what we want our collection to include in the future. This project has already started: the faces of Professor Pamela Sue Anderson, Professor Jane Shaw and Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, for instance, speak to a fresh and contemporary understanding of our college. Let us think creatively about the possibilities inherent in commemoration, and about the ways in which the past, present and future can be made to interact.

These are the conversations that we need to be having. And they are important and positive conversations for us to have, even – perhaps especially – when they are also difficult. We owe it to ourselves – and the subjects of our portraits – to do better.

Dr Leif Dixon is Supernumerary Fellow & Director of Studies in History at Regent’s Park College.