The chancellor of the prestigious Oxford University in England, Christopher Patten, has told the students at Oxford that if they don’t like the statue and plaque dedicated to Cecil Rhodes, who founded the Rhodes Scholarship, they should leave. He suggested China. He pointed out that China does not allow western culture in their universities:
“If people at our university aren’t prepared to show the generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history … then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.”
“If you want universities like that, you go to China where they are not allowed to talk about ‘western values.”’
Cecil Rhodes made his fortune in mining interests in Africa. He sponsored a college in Africa and set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which allows 52 students a year to attend Oxford, with all expenses paid. The first scholarship was given out in 1902, but the first scholarship student actually began attending in 1904. Other benefactors have added to the scholarships which at one point reached 92, but is currently at 83. Bill Clinton and singer Kris Kristofferson both attended Oxford on Rhodes Scholarships.
The school is now being pressured by students to remove Rhodes’ statue and plaque from the university. One of their leaders is African student, Ntokozo Qwabe, who happens to attend Oxford on a………..you guessed it……….a Rhodes Scholarship. The statue of Rhodes at University of Cape Town, has already been torn down as protesters chanted for the death of all white people. Sound familiar?
Patten compared the protesters to American students who are so tender and vulnerable, they need “safe spaces” are are calling for removal of statues of radicals like Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson. The protesters claim that having to walk by the statue is an act of violence against non-whites. Oh, poor babies.
Classics professor Mary Beard of Cambridge University had the best reponse:
“I really don’t think that you can have your cake and eat it here: I mean you can’t whitewash Rhodes out of history, but go on using his cash. And his cash has done a huge amount of good in bringing foreign students to this country … Wouldn’t it be better to celebrate what we have managed to achieve with Rhodes’s money, whatever his views. If he was bad, then we have certainly turned his cash to the better… and maybe, to give him for a moment the benefit of the doubt, if he had been born a hundred years later even he would have thought differently.”
I agree. If they take the statue down, return the money to the Rhodes estate and send Qwabe and his ilk home.