By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The campaign to rename university buildings and remove statues that student activists find offensive has not ended. There are many examples. Yale’s Calhoun College is under attack because Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun was a supporter of slavery. There are demands that Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University be renamed because Wilson is now seen as a racist.
As far as I can tell, the above demands have not been met. We will see what happens in the future. But Georgetown University gave in to the demands that the school’s Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall be renamed because Thomas F. Mulledy, SJ, and William McSherry, S., 18th-century Jesuit presidents of Georgetown, were involved in the slave trade. (As were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. That doesn’t make it right, but it gives the Jesuits’ slaveholding context.)
The British newspaper The Guardian reported on how Oxford University dealt with similar pressure. The university demonstrated that there is a way to handle these renaming demands in a civil manner, without giving in to unreasonable protests. According to The Guardian, “Oriel College has said it will not remove the controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University despite a campaign by students who believe the British imperialist’s legacy should not be celebrated.”
The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement argued that the “statue of the man who was an ardent imperialist and left a sizable sum to the college in his will, was representative of Britain’s ‘imperial blind spot’ and should be taken down.”
The university did not deny Rhodes’ imperialist history, but said a consultation process had shown “overwhelming” support for keeping the statue.
“Following careful consideration,” said the university, “the college’s governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place and that the college will seek to provide a clear historical context to explain why it is there. The college confirmed it had been warned of the possibility that it would lose about 100m pounds in gifts should the statue be taken down but a spokesman insisted the financial implications were not the primary consideration.”
He said the college believed the discussion over whether or not the statue should stay needed to be addressed “in a spirit of free speech and open debate, with a readiness to listen to divergent views” noting that the school “received an enormous amount of input, including comments from students and academics, alumni, heritage bodies, national and student polls…as well as over 500 direct written responses to the college,” with the overwhelming majority “in support of the statue remaining in place, for a variety of reasons.”
The protesters disagree, of course. Their position, in the words of Brian Kwoba, one of the leaders of the campaign to remove the statue, was that “Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue of Hitler? The fact that Rhodes is still memorialized with statues, plaques, and buildings demonstrates the size and strength of Britain’s imperial blind spot.”
The university did not make light of the protesters’ position. According to The Guardian, the university’s chancellor, Chris Patten, told the protesting students that it was a question of “freedom of thought” and that the debate over the Rhodes statue “underlined that the continuing presence of these historical artifacts is an important reminder of the complexity of history and of the legacies of colonialism still felt today.”
The highly respected classicist Mary Beard supported the university’s decision. In an article for the Times Literary Supplement, she wrote, “The battle isn’t won by taking the statue away and pretending those people didn’t exist. It’s won by empowering those students to look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self-confident sense of unbatterability.”
Not everyone in Great Britain was as careful not to ruffle the feathers of the protesters. J.K., a reader from Prescott, Ariz., forwarded to First Teachers a column on the topic by the British journalist James Delingpole from the website biznews.com.
Writes Delingpole, “Rhodes’ generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and wellbeing of many generations of Oxford students.” The presence of his statue “doesn’t necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime — but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago.”
Delingpole thinks it is a “ludicrous notion that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of ‘institutional racism’.”
Delingpole disputes that racism was the motive of those who honored Rhodes with the statue, but argues that even if it were, “So bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their ‘safe space’ violated really doesn’t deserve to be here.”
He asks, “If we were to remove Rhodes’ statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful — Edward II and Charles I — that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite — Christ Church — was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: Does that invalidate the U.S. Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: Was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”
Delingpole continues: “Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic, and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian R.W. Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the al-Qaeda have been doing to artifacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
“And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers ‘whites have to be killed.’ One of you — Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh — is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is ‘Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer’; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for ‘socially conscious black students’ to ‘dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!’”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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