@Tanith
“ R0wantrees
Sheffield apparently has blackballed Isaac Newton.
What crimes has Newton been accused of?”
Racism. He’s supposed to have benefitted from the Slave Trade 🙄
Wish I’d heard the reaction when the Physics department was told! 
This stuff drives me crazy.
My university did a big project looking into connections to the slave trade.
They found among IIRC two or three things of note. One of the early governors, when he had lived in the US, seemed to have had a slave who did some sort of household work.
One of the early governors was also a part owner of a company that had dealings with companies that had something to do with sugar plantations and such.
And the university had money given to it early in its history that came from some investments that had links to the same kinds of industries.
Well, ok, that's kind of interesting in terms of looking at the way the economy worked at that time, but what it seems to show is that the university existed within a larger economy of the 18th century, and what I wonder is, how could it not have been, and what is it we are supposed to conclude here?
I find myself wondering, if we looked today at all the investments of the university, and all the investments and business connections of the governors and donors, and all the pension plans of the staff, how much dirty money might we find today? And to what extent could we avoid that kind of connection without completely cutting ourselves off from the worldwide economy? And to what extent do we think the university is morally culpable for that, or people in the university?
It's interesting to me that in this specific instance, and I think in many others where similar projects are going on, there is a lot less sense that we need to take responsibility and be culpable for the current stuff than the things that happened safely in the past.