Introducing a series on the strange things I have experienced at the University of Edinburgh.

But first some biographical context: From Wellington to Edinburgh.

From October 2018 I spent ten months in Aotearoa, New Zealand, land of the long white cloud on a working holiday visa. Before this I had moved from job to job, relationship to relationship, and while I had an incredible friendship group, and loved my family, I needed to take myself out of my own life so that I could reflect on it and think about how I wanted to be in this world… Yes. I went to find myself; an interesting cliche of my disenfranchised and deconstructed generation but that is a conversation for another time. I spent the first 6 weeks touring the north island before settling for the remainder of my trip in the capital Wellington, which I initially passed through on my way to the south island before returning to find work once I had ran out of money.

First I took a job cleaning for a hostel, Nomads Capital Backpackers. 15 hours a week covered a bed to sleep in and $25 a week on top; a position I was only allowed for three months to allow other wandering souls the same opportunity. The second, and last job I had in NZ, was as front of house staff at Macs Brewbar (now SHED22). To be honest, this is probably the most enjoyable employment I have ever had, it was there I met people I would share a flat with for the remainder of my stay who I have kept in contact with and consider good friends to this day.

I missed the opportunity to extend my visa for a second year and was then confronted with the choice of leaving to travel elsewhere - which I couldn’t afford - or returning home. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the details and I would have been able to stay there for much longer, but then I probably wouldn’t be sat here writing this piece that you probably aren’t reading.

To be honest, I was pretty miserable when I left for NZ. I had built a personality for my own protection and my own benefit and it was beginning to weigh heavily on me. I was my own worst enemy while convinced the world was out to get me and suspicious of any act of kindness and decency as a disguise for someone else’s expedient benefit seeking. I may have been projecting a little.

It was while I was in NZ that I read Jordan Peterson’s first 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos where I made the conscious decision to pick a rule and practice it. Having spent hours watching and listening to his lectures and talks, even attending one of them in Christchurch while in NZ, I had practiced a kind of prayer he proposed that would work if it was done the right way. The prayer was to sit on the edge of your bed and ask yourself what stupid things you do that make your life harder than it needs to be, that you could stop doing. Importantly, you had to ask this question and actually want to know the answer. Asking performatively doesn’t work. It seems we are somewhat ultimately able to see through our own bullshit. Thankfully.

I tried this prayer a few times and eventually I was left with a fairly long list of stupid things I was doing. Right at the top of this list was ‘you lie all the time’. And I did. Language was a tool at my disposal to get what I wanted. If I wanted people to think of me a certain way; or if I didn’t want to have a certain conversation; or if I wanted to be funny; then all I needed to do was come up with the right words to bring about the desired state of affairs I was after. I wasn’t always amazing at this; not being an actual sociopath, just a wannabe sociopath.

It was chapter eight of JBPs book that I chose to practice: Tell the truth. Or at least don’t lie. It was, in part, this practice that resulted in the permanence of the friendships I made while I was there. It was through reading books like that and paying attention to what happened around me and in my own mind as I practiced the advice and listening to similar voices that my thinking had started to lean toward the philosophical, psychological, and even the theological.

When confronted with having to return to somewhere I had been pretty miserable, as I have made clear, by my own hands, I was determined that I would not go back to the cycles I had trapped myself in. Having practiced mindfulness and painfully honest-self critique, even for a few months, I set my sights on education. Having worked as a hotel reservationist before the internet killed that job; behind a bar or two; part time as a cleaner; a year or two as a labourer; a year or two as a personal trainer; and two and a half years selling insurance, I realised the reason why I never stayed anywhere for long: This was because I was incredibly entitled and was of the mindset that employers were lucky to have me even absent any real evidence for this other than my now dwindling good looks, charm, and the occasional delusion of grandeur. I felt I was owed employment, good pay, and to be left alone from any additional requests for the adoption of responsibility.

I set my sights on education to provide myself with a solid foundation on which to base my life. I had decided not to pursue this when I was younger, which I do not regret. It would not have been good for me to go to modern universities when I was eighteen. I also realised I had some differing opinions than was becoming the mainstream on topics like race, sex, gender, social justice, revolution, liberation movements and I wanted to gain the tools to be able to organise my thoughts, to read, write, and speak so that I could engage with those topics to the level their seriousness deserves.

Two of my flat mates were from Glasgow but spoke very highly of Edinburgh, I had not been to either city at that stage. I looked up the philosophy course for Edinburgh, found the course descriptions fascinating, mainly because I had so little clue what they were talking about but I wanted to find out. So, I booked myself onto a humanities and social sciences access course at my local college to get my qualifications, said my goodbyes and then headed home. I landed August 2019, went to college, applied to Edinburgh as my first choice. Then COVID happened, I spent the summer of 2020 unnecessarily worrying universities would be shut, and then off I went to Edinburgh to start my degree.

Fast forward to today, three years later, about to enter my fourth and final year of my undergraduate philosophy degree, I sit myself down to finally write about all the strange things that have happened since I have been at the University of Edinburgh. I will close this first installment with a brief overview of what I am going to be talking about in this series:

1. The de-naming of David Hume Tower to 40 George Square in response to a petition in protest to a racist footnote on one page of David Hume’s entire corpus. Seemingly forgetting that people are complex and can be wrong about something even as a towering figure of intellect. The decision to change the name was made; then a conversation was had; and then it went quiet as the politically untenable option of restoring the name cowed most into silent acceptance on the issue. Prof. Jonathan Hearn and more recently prof. Michael Gill have written on the topic considering the critique but re-emphasising that moral standards change and that people are complex and can be wrong while still being able to make valuable philosophical, moral, and ethical contributions. The petition garnered around 1700 signatures. Which out of the student population is less than 5%; and out of the city population is much less than 5%.

2. Edinburgh University Student’s Association (EUSA) annually, knowingly and gleefully engage in identity-based discrimination for the Liberation Officer representative positions. Early 2021 I formally complained and I was given s.159 of the Equality Act (2010) as a defence for this. I read this piece of legislation, which does say when you can discriminate on the basis of supposed protected characteristics, but it also gave several criteria to qualify to use this as a defence. Criteria which EUSA do not meet. I raised this complaint all the way to the university and was told I would need to take EUSA to court to see the substance of my argument dealt with. I have been campaigning to get signatures to have the issue voted on at the student council. I will be pushing for this one final time before I leave.

3. The literature language and culture school sent out an email advertising to students a paid position as a ‘critical reader’ which entails looking at potential course content through the lens of diversity, equity, inclusion, and decolonisation. Concepts that we learn concern themselves with identity characteristics if we ask the questions: Diversity of what? Inclusion of what? Equality between what? So, in other words, the ‘critical reader’ position financially incentivises students to think about the value of potential course content through the lens of skin colour, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, disability, nationality, etc.; i.e., financially incentivising students to think like prejudicial morons.

4. Now retired lecturer and honorary fellow Neil Thin, whose research interests were “Happiness, wellbeing and the good life, appreciative research, aspirational social planning” was suspended during the summer of 2021 following an event held on campus called “resisting whiteness” which racially segregated audience members during the Q&A section of the event. When Neil pointed this out, he was tarred as a racist, a bigot, and a transphobe for some reason to do with a tweet of J.K Rowling’s he liked or spoke in defence of. He received no support from management during this time, and was later exonerated though felt he could not return to teaching and has since retired. I have spoken on one or two occasions with Neil and he has, I was pleased to hear, transcended the incident.

5. In my second year mandatory philosophy courses, a large number of the papers I was given to read were from the tradition of critical theory. Critical theory, broadly speaking, is a radical form of societal critique that takes an explicitly radical, political, identity conscious approach to thinking and acting about social dynamics while seeking to bring about a desired state of affairs they sell as liberatory and so nobody seems to mind because it sounds nice. My lecturer did not mention the words ‘critical theory’ until I asked a question during a Q&A. I then spent four office hour sessions for at least 40 minutes a time trying to draw the connection to the reading material, critical theory, and their practical political goals, and asked why this wasn’t something she thought relevant to mention. I didn’t get much of a response so I made a formal complaint, not about the content itself, but the absence of any context of radical political activist scholars using knowledge production to raise critical consciousness in pursuit of their radical political goals. Context, it took all of 5-10 minutes to give in the Q&A. Context, I was told by the head of philosophy Michael Gill, it was unreasonable to expect in an 11-week course. Michael Gill was later a lecturer on an early modern philosophy course I took and put aside half an hour of the penultimate class to speak to the issue of Hume’s racism, showing that context on important practical matters is appropriate and reasonable to expect in an 11-week course.

6. The twice cancelled screening and discussion of the movie Adult Human Female. I have spoken at length about this here so I won’t say anymore now. Following the second cancellation I organised a secret screening of the movie on campus and invited interested students to attend. This was not the first secret event I attended on campus.

That will suffice for the time being, perhaps there are one or two more that tie in with the ones already mentioned, but I will endeavour to include as much detail as I can as I work through this list in the up coming series. With my semester starting in a few weeks I will aim to have covered all of these and anything else that pops up by the end of the summer following my last semester.

As always, I would love to hear from anyone who has any comments, feedback, or insults.

See you on the next one. Take care of yourselves.