News that Cambridge University is to commission an art installation to adorn one of its ancient buildings rarely warrants holding the front page. But when higher education is in sway to the cult of decolonisation, we know this will be no ordinary sculpture. Forget beauty, skill or originality. This new installation is not a celebration of artistic excellence but a monument to identity politics. The artist will be black and the art must memorialise black Cambridge scholars or graduates.
The new work is one of a series of commitments announced by Cambridge University in response to the findings of its three year-long inquiry into how the institution benefited from slavery. The conclusions of the report will surprise no one: the university received ‘significant benefits from companies that participated in the slave trade’ as well as from ‘individual benefactors and from fees derived from the families of plantation owners’. The only remarkable thing is that it took the Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group so long to reach this conclusion.
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