Sir, – I was dismayed to read Orla O’Donovan’s piece “‘What’s up with the dude wall?’ Rows of portraits of men should have no place in Irish education” (Opinion & Analysis, September 23rd).
She complains of the practice of hanging portraits of past university presidents, almost all male, on prominent dedicated walls in Irish universities because these displays are records of class privilege, male supremacy and colonialism. She advocates removing these portraits from their present locations to “heritage storage facilities” in the universities and she refers specifically to a “dude wall” of past male university presidents in her own university, University College Cork (UCC). I am well familiar with this wall in UCC’s Aula Maxima.
I just cannot sympathise with this attitude of judging the past using the standards of the present and of penalising people in the present because of injustices, judged by present standards, their forebears perpetrated in times past. People cannot be held responsible for the actions of their forebears. This attitude promoted by Orla O’Donovan ignores the obvious fact of evolution. Human beings are self conscious animals that arose from the merely conscious animal world. We didn’t emerge from the animal world with mature notions of human rights, equality, gender balance and so on. Such concepts and practices had to evolve and take hold slowly over time. All we can hope for in this area is improvement. And humanity has steadily improved. Orla might note that over half of the presidents of the 12 Irish universities are now women.
We have no right generally to look back on much of what happened in earlier time and judge things harshly. There are some exceptions of course, for example the African slave trade to the New World run largely by supposed Christian Europeans. But, even in this case, it was these same Europeans who eventually banned the slave trade.
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By all means let us strive to abolish discrimination and to foster fairness. But it is probably just as important to understand where we have been as to plot a path to where we would like to go. – Yours, etc,
WILLIAM REVILLE,
Emeritus Professor,
University College Cork.