AT the heart of the University of Aberdeen is one of the most beautiful and striking buildings in the country. The Sir Duncan Rice Library is a seven-storey modernist glass cube. It looks as if Klimt has been painting on it, shimmering as it does with white paint and reflected light. So high it can be seen from all parts of the campus, it is a fitting physical and intellectual legacy for the former Principal, for whom it is named.

The death of Professor Sir Duncan Rice last week, at the age of 79, was a chance to reflect on the career of a remarkable man. By the time many of us met him, as Aberdeen’s Principal, he was a titan: vigorous and visionary, the definition of a power in the land.

Although known as a genius fund-raiser, his academic roots were in history. As a young lecturer at Aberdeen in the 1960s, he wrote one of the first books offering an introduction to the slave trade, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery, followed later by The Scots Abolitionists 1831-61.

READ MORE: Primary's sexist sloganeering

Among his many innovations as Principal was the creation of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, led by Professor Tom Devine. During Rice’s tenure, Aberdeen University became one of the most ambitious and forward-looking institutions of higher learning in the UK. But, pragmatist though he was, he once told this paper that “thinking for its own sake” was a crucial component of any university education.

History, you might say, is all about thinking for its own sake. It is a subject where the facts are often missing, or so incomplete you must read between the lines. Interpretation is almost as important a part of the historian’s role as finding documentary evidence. Devine, Scotland’s foremost historian, and Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University, has called it the Queen of disciplines. At the moment, however, he, and others, are beleaguered and bruised by the subject to which they have devoted their lives.

Anyone who has had dealings with university departments knows what a snake-pit of conflicting ambitions and interests they can be. Competition can be ferocious, as can disagreements. Even so, the latest spat in Scottish historical circles has reached an unprecedented level of confrontation.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Professor Sir Geoff Palmer, Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt University, who was knighted for services to human rights, science and charity, was asked to chair two panels looking into Edinburgh’s involvement in the slave trade.

At the heart of the controversy sits Henry Dundas, whose soaring monument in St Andrew Square now bears a hotly contested plaque attesting to his role in delaying the abolition of the slave trade, and “the more than half a million Africans whose enslavement was a consequence”.

READ MORE: Robert Burns' legacy lives on

Dundas’s fiercest critics view him as the figurehead for the nation’s part in this atrocious trade. Nobody can deny that Scotland played a prominent and eager role in slavery, which made many merchants a fortune. What is open to dispute, though, is whether Dundas, by delaying abolition, was hoping to ensure the bill’s eventual success, or was simply reluctant to see this gravy train derailed. At stake is whether he was a shrewd political operator or man of unspeakable amorality.

Gradually in recent years Scotland’s history has been re-examined and amplified, to include people of colour, who all too often have been airbrushed out of the picture. This is essential, long-overdue work. Yet as the Dundas case shows, it can also be explosive.

When Professor Jonathan Hearn of Edinburgh University wrote an article in The Spectator, he said that Palmer’s review group “risks being historically superficial… Dundas was no saint, but history is complex”. In response, Palmer derided Hearn and his “academic racist gang”. When Devine called for Palmer’s resignation as chair, Palmer called this demand racist.

It doesn’t get much more heated than that. Devine denounced Palmer’s “appalling slurs of racism against those whose only fault was to have a different view from his own”. Edinburgh University did not offer much in the way of support, and some backed Palmer. Professor Tommy J Curry, also of Edinburgh University, spoke of “the naivety of Scottish culture that it wants to have the debate but is not used to having arguments about race where black people themselves have the power to name racism in society.”

Calling people racist for holding diverging opinions, however, does not fall within the accepted boundaries of scholarly debate. Rather than enable discussion, it paralyses freedom of enquiry and thought. Nobody timid will now dare enter this arena.

Since this furore, a paper on the complexities of assessing Dundas has been published by Professor Angela McCarthy of the University of Otago in New Zealand (available on Edinburgh University Press’s website). Although its conclusions robustly uphold the position of Hearn and Devine, it is unlikely to pour oil on troubled waters.

The rancour this spat has roused has struck academia like a bolt of lightning. The benighted period in question, for which every sane person feels revulsion and shame, deserves exceptionally rigorous handling. Emotive though the subject is, reputations such as Devine’s and Hearn’s cannot be trashed as if they were merely collateral damage in an intellectual fist-fight. Defamatory language is counter-productive, not to mention completely unfounded. It sullies not just individuals, but the true nature of historical enquiry.

The academic world might be combative, but serious historical research is slow, painstaking and rational. It has to be, otherwise it is meaningless, its conclusions nothing more than opinion or conjecture. The work of a historian involves years of spadework, much of it as tedious and exhausting as panning for gold in the hope of the smallest nugget.

The urge to unearth the past begins with fascination and the desire to learn more. Beyond that initial spark, it cannot be fuelled by emotion. Cool heads are essential when combing the archives for evidence. In his own time Dundas was dubbed “Harry the Ninth”, the “uncrowned king of Scotland”, and a “despot”.

Now, it is time for name-calling to cease. For the sake of all involved, civilised and respectful discussion and deliberation must resume. Only then can the correct label eventually be hung around Dundas’s neck. We may safely assume Duncan Rice would approve.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Herald.