In February, the nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, escaped – in the eyes of some – from ‘cancellation’ at one of London’s most prestigious academic institutions. Huxley, a prominent advocate of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, promoted the racist view that Black people had inferior capabilities compared with white people.

A report prepared in November 2021 by a team of faculty members and internal and external advisers at Imperial College London had recommended stripping Huxley’s name from the mathematics and computing department building, and removing his bust from the entrance hall.

But after extensive consultation, the Imperial administrators decided not to accept the recommendation, and are instead now discussing other options: contextualising Huxley’s status and views, and adding the name of a scientist associated with the college who is from an under-represented ethnic group to the Huxley Building.

The decision was largely an attempt to balance the report’s recommendations with the views expressed by the university community in the consultations that followed its publication.

Not everyone agrees that this is the right move – especially those who have felt the sting of racism in their daily work as researchers.

“The purpose of naming a building after someone is to honour that person,” says Rahma Elmahdi, a Black clinician and epidemiologist at Aalborg University and Hillerød Hospital in Copenhagen. Elmahdi, who earned a PhD at Imperial and previously worked there, adds: “I think it is an insult to the Black people who continue to work and study in a building named after a person who was so adamant in questioning their capabilities and equality.”

Whatever the eventual outcome, the fractious debate about how to deal with the cultural and institutional legacies of racism and colonialism will surely continue. The debate was largely catalysed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020.

In the United Kingdom, a key initial focus was the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. That action polarised public opinion, with some UK government ministers suggesting that history was being ‘erased’. The arguments became part of the ‘culture wars’ – and British scientific institutions, along with others around the world, have been drawn into them.

Although the US debate has focused largely on systemic racism in the context of slavery and civil rights, the flashpoints in the United Kingdom are imperialism and colonialism, which involved white Europeans exploiting other ethnic groups, especially through the slave trade and oppression of Indigenous people.

Scientific ideas and institutions were intimately connected to that legacy; in London, the capital of the British Empire, that is particularly apparent. Most obviously, Imperial College, an amalgamation of several earlier institutions, founded in 1907 – when the Empire was at its height, covering nearly one-quarter of Earth’s total land area – is named for it.

(Some commented on the irony of the Huxley Building being potentially renamed while the institution’s name remained.)

Imperial is one of a handful of UK scientific institutions examining racism in their own histories, and how to acknowledge and redress its legacy. Other institutions and scientific departments around the globe are seeking to recast curricula and address racism’s influence in shaping their fields.

“If Imperial does not honestly contend with its history of racism, it makes it easy for Black students and staff to continue to feel excluded and othered in their own institution,” says Elmahdi. And it’s not just, or even primarily, about names.

“There are a lot of material changes that need to happen – funding, career progression, more opportunities that target previously excluded groups,” she says.

In the wake of BLM, Imperial College decided to remove the Latin motto from displays of the college’s crest, which loosely translates as ‘Science is the empire’s crown jewel and protector.’ When this was announced in 2020, “there was a backlash, and quite a few alumni wrote in expressing their displeasure”, says structural biologist Stephen Curry, Imperial’s assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion, who is white.

Curry attributes some of this to “nervousness on the part of white men that any discussion around changing the status quo is seen as a threat to them. And to some extent, it is, as we have benefited from the established norms for so long.”

Imperial convened the History Group, chaired by chemical engineer Nilay Shah, and brought in historians from University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford, UK, to “examine the history of the College through its links to the British Empire, and to report on the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage”, says the report.

Meanwhile, a separate group looked at staff demographics and at the role of factors related to ethnicity in systems for promotions and grievances, as well as in student data, such as admissions, results and subsequent graduate employment.

The History Group’s report “highlighted contributions of people of colour and women who had been largely ignored”, says Elmahdi. “It helps to show the diversity and breadth of the college’s history.” Among other measures, it recommended that greater recognition be given to former alumni of colour, such as Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam and to female staff such as Margaret White Fishenden, an engineer who became an assistant professor at Imperial in 1947.

The report says that Huxley’s 1865 essay Emancipation – Black and White “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today”. For example, Huxley infamously wrote: “The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.” The report argues that such abhorrent beliefs “fall far short of Imperial’s modern values”.

Like many faculty members at Imperial, Curry didn’t initially see a strong case for removing Huxley’s name and likeness. “Huxley was an abolitionist, pro-women in science, very progressive in his way,” he says. “There are many things to celebrate. But you can’t excuse the racism.” What changed his mind was hearing from Black staff members “about what walking into a building named after Huxley meant for them, and how it impacted their daily experience”.

The views that Huxley expressed “permeate even now”, says Wayne Mitchell, a senior teaching fellow in the department of medicine at Imperial, who is Black. “If you’re venerating someone [with those views], that’s where structural racism comes in. It is intertwined into the building itself.”

• A Nature report