Tom Leonard

Rhodes Must Fall campaigners won’t disappear just because they lost

Don’t imagine that the campaign group ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ has gone away just because Rhodes didn’t fall. They’ve now issued a list of demands, including a call for Oxford to ‘acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing violence of empire’. And if America is anything to go by, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The US prides itself on taking free speech seriously but the leaders of its finest universities are in full retreat from undergraduates demanding the most dubious of corrections in the cause of progressive principles. And while Oxford’s chancellor, Chris Patten, and Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor, gamely told students to either grow up or take a hike, their Ivy League peers have been running up white flags at the first sign of trouble. No need to ask them to ‘recontextualise’ controversial iconography, as Oxford students demanded over Rhodes, they’ll happily rip the whole lot down for you – no questions asked.

America’s great historical vice is, of course, slavery rather than colonialism. A week or so ago, Julia Adams, master of Yale’s Calhoun College, announced it would be taking down paintings of John C Calhoun from the dining room and even her private residence after students complained that Calhoun, VP for President J.Q. Adams, was a ‘notorious slavery advocate’. She couldn’t do anything about the dining hall’s stained glass windows showing slaves picking cotton, Julia added, because they are part of the building’s structure. Yale is actually considering renaming the entire college, despite a poll that found more students wanted to keep Calhoun’s name than ditch it.

At Princeton, it’s the former US president Woodrow Wilson whose head is on the block. Students led by the Black Justice League – a newly formed group of black students and their white supporters – recently staged a sit-in in the president’s office, refusing to leave until he promised to improve race relations on the campus.

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