Students  from Oxford are attempting to force the University to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor Cecil Rhodes. The “Rhodes Must Fall campaign” met it’s match in a letter posted somewhere on the interwebs. Probably one of the best retorts to the spoiled children in academia everywhere.  

You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the‪ #‎blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.

Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind. We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.

 

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.   Read the entire letter here…..

On 19 January 2016, students at the Oxford Union voted 245 to 212 in favour of removing the statue of Rhodes from the campus. However, on 29 January 2016, it was announced that the statue would remain, after “furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million” if it was removed.