gotta read this one ez...
My Friends,
Wonder Why Our Premier Universities lack the pride and sense of purpose to take a stand such as this? Does Political Correctness come to mind?
Read and share this remarkable rebuke to a student protest group by the Oriel College, Oxford University.
Bob.
This message came from a Family in South Africa. It appears that some
black students from South Africa are studying at Oriel College, Oxford,
on Rhodes Scholarships. They have taken exception to the presence of a
bronze bust of Cecil John Rhodes, the great imperialist and the one who
established the trust from which the scholarships that bear his name are
funded to this day. They are demanding that it be removed. This is the
wonderful response by the Dean of the College. Students at that College
are known as "Scrotties" for some reason.
Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort
and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of
them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in
his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a
century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs 2. If you don’t understand what
this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case
– then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I
at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant
university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th
century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western
civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the
Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger
Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir
Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson,
Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal
Newman. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and
study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma
mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts,
mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African
civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The
contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near
as damn it to zilch.
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.
That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up
with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red
rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What
a clever chap you are!” No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas
tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the
Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you
like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic –
otherwise your idea is worthless.
This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes
should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of
“institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which
we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that
they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space”
violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to
remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free,
where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out,
Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful – Edward II and
Charles I – that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite –
Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off
two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the
US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims
and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”
Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is
not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with
Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no
different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artefacts
in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it
should order its affairs? Your ??Rhodes Must Fall campaign, we
understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black
activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One
of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician
and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the
Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a
beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for
“socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and
do so ruthlessly and decisively!”
Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural
enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an
AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and
ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates,
institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a
collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will
enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.
And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing
campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent,
more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those
22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation
of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t
merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life
and fabric of our beloved university.
Understand us and understand this clearly: You have everything to learn
from us; we have nothing to learn from you.
Yours, Oriel College, Oxford
