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‘What’s up with the dude wall?’ Rows of portraits of men should have no place in Irish education

Academic portraiture sustains the myths of meritocracy and obscures privilege or, as Michelle Obama put it, the affirmative action of generational wealth

A gallery devoted to pictures of women and self-portraits at London's National Portrait Gallery. One response to the dude wall problem has been to dismantle them. Another has been to commission collections of portraits of women. Photograph: Tom Jamieson/New York Times
A gallery devoted to pictures of women and self-portraits at London's National Portrait Gallery. One response to the dude wall problem has been to dismantle them. Another has been to commission collections of portraits of women. Photograph: Tom Jamieson/New York Times
Órla O'Donovan
Mon Sept 23 2024 - 06:15

When invited to present awards at New York’s Rockefeller University, the US journalist Rachel Maddow asked the much-publicised question, “What’s up with the dude wall?” Since then, “dude wall” has become shorthand for troubling collections of portraits of elite white men. What place, if any, have they in contemporary public universities?

University College Cork, where I work, has one. The university website tells us that the portraits of former presidents “form a coherent display of the institutional history of the university” and visitors “can appreciate the heritage and history of the display in the august surroundings of the Aula Maxima”.

The oldest portrait of is of Sir Robert Kane, a chemist and medical doctor who in 1845 became the university’s first president. Then called Queen’s College Cork, the university was originally an institution of empire, open only to men, and primarily a medical school in the service of British militarism. The continuing value placed by the institution on academic portraiture is evident in the commissioning and unveiling ceremony of the most recent addition to the collection in 2023 at a cost of almost €38,000.

The term “dude wall” also signals a profound problem facing universities. Collections of academic portraits are archival records of institutional histories of class privilege, and white and male supremacy. Without explicit intention, they communicate to many students that “this institution was never meant for you”.

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Increasingly, universities internationally are being forced to acknowledge and reckon with their institutional histories of elitism and exploitation. Trinity College Dublin now has a colonial legacies project, akin to the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative, and the University of Strasbourg’s Medicine and National Socialism project.

Universities’ complicity in oppression is not all far away and in the distant past. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes provided details of the non-consensual transfer of infant remains from those institutions to Irish medical schools for anatomisation, something about which Irish universities have remained largely silent.

Many reckoning initiatives have focused on human remains and artefacts in universities’ museums and storage facilities – what the medical historian Manon Parry refers to as risky materials. These are material remains of universities’ entanglements in regimes of use, extraction and exploitation of poor, “othered” and colonised communities that, increasingly, are being removed from public view.

For example, in the days of Robert Kane, the teaching of anatomy relied on human remains obtained from the poor who died in the Cork workhouse. Other examples recorded in the UCC archives are an “Inca’s skull” gifted in 1897 for display in a college museum, and specimens of “human monsters”. For Parry, because “the work to address centuries of abuse and discrimination as well as their contemporary manifestations is ongoing and complex, removing [risky] objects ... has become a simple, and in my view insufficient, strategy to circumvent critique”. In contrast, up to recently, portraits of university presidents have not been deemed to be risky or obsolete.

One response to the dude wall problem has been to dismantle them. Against the background of mounting attention to histories of medical violence and racism, together with growing numbers of black and women students, in 2018 Harvard Medical School removed its collection, dispersing individual portraits to meeting rooms and lobbies. Another response has been to commission collections of portraits of women.

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland now has a collection called Women on Walls, to recognise “the pioneering achievements of eight extraordinary women and enhance the visibility of historical female leaders in healthcare”. Although acknowledging the problems of dude walls, both responses retain the framework, practice and thinking behind academic portraiture. Continuing to celebrate individualism and individual “luminaries”, they sustain the myths of meritocracy and obscure the operations of privilege (or, as Michelle Obama recently put it, the affirmative action of generational wealth) and the inevitably collective nature of academic achievement.

[ After 280 years Trinity finally unveils busts to women in Long Room ]

Another – and more radical – way of responding to the dude wall problem is to learn from the Rhodes Must Fall movement that began in 2015 in the University of Cape Town. Focused initially on the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes as a symbol of white supremacy and privilege, it was part of a broader movement to decolonise university education. For that movement, decolonising the university starts with changes to symbols, buildings and public space. This is a first, and relatively easy, step towards the creation of conditions in which those traditionally excluded or tolerated can have a sense of belonging.

But these conditions must necessarily extend to significant public investment in higher education. So too must they extend to the enormously challenging process of decolonisation of knowledge that requires recognition and refusal of extractive and violent habits of thinking, teaching and researching, traces of which remain in the cultures of disciplines in the contemporary university.

I favour ending the institutional habit of dude walls and moving historic academic portraits to universities’ heritage storage facilities, but where these facilities become key sites of learning and reckoning with troubling institutional inheritances. These heritage facilities could become akin to the museum-graveyards envisaged by Achille Mbembe, the South African-based decolonisation scholar and supporter of Rhodes Must Fall. These are places where statues of white supremacists are laid to rest, but not in the spirit of burying them, as the harms done by universities cannot be undone and their past inevitably haunts their present.

Learning and reckoning with academic portraits could be enhanced by their storage in such museum-graveyards in the company of risky archival matter. Bringing the portraits face to face with those materials would help us remember and learn with, instead of honouring, dude walls.

Órla O’Donovan is a senior lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. A version of this essay was first published in the Community Development Journal.