Our heritage is not our own: the digital world and difficult histories

The digital world has brought many benefits for academic heritage. It has allowed audiences to discover the history, heritage and collections of universities in ways that were unimaginable 30 years ago. But it has also opened the past to unprecedented scrutiny and raised difficult questions for universities. Increasingly, academic institutions are being questioned publicly in the digital world about the provenance of their cultural and heritage collections, about the land on which the university is built and where historic institutional funding has its origins.

It is right that these legitimate questions should be discussed and universities around the world have received praise for how they have responded. There are undoubtedly more questions to be asked and difficult answers to follow. But what particular pressures do such issues raise for university heritage professionals within and outside our institutions? Do they reveal a tension in academic heritage when promoting knowledge and encouraging debate questions the foundations of our institutions? This paper examines some of difficult questions that are being asked of universities’ past in the digital world, the ways in which some universities have responded and suggests how academic heritage professionals might respond.