Rhodes to redemption: why Oxford needs a monument to Benjamin Jowett

Not since September 1642, when a mob of Parliamentary soldiers opened fire on the sculpture of the Virgin Mary carved into the side of the University Church, has Oxford been in such a fury over statues. The ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign that started among radical students in 2016 has now spread to the senior common rooms, particularly the SCR of Worcester College which, astonishingly, has taken over from Balliol and Wadham as the headquarters of the workers’ revolution. More than 150 academics have signed a petition calling for their fellow dons to maintain a virtual picket line around Oriel College — that is, to refuse to teach its students or attend its seminars or help with its outreach programmes — as long as the statue of Rhodes remains in its imperial eyrie on the opposite side of the High Street from the sculpture of the Virgin Mary.

I’m not alone in feeling a certain unease about the neo-Puritan call for tearing down statues, let alone punishing Oriel students who have no say over whether the statue stays or goes. It’s not just that Rhodes is a complicated man whose name is plastered all over the university. Or that almost every-body from the dark ages before 1960 is implicated in attitudes that we now find repugnant. ‘Use every man after his desert,’ as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, ‘and who should ’scape whipping?’ Certainly not Lord Clarendon, Lord Leverhulme or Augustus Pitt Rivers and endless other university benefactors. My basic objection is that it is surely better to erect new statues of our own to celebrate contemporary values rather than to tear down old statues and the memories that they entomb. Tearing down statues may produce a brief paroxysm of righteousness but then leaves nothing but emptiness in its wake. Erecting new statues can instil hope in the next generation.