Calls for head of Oxford college to quit as Rhodes fiasco puts jobs at risk

Oriel pandered to a wholly unnecessary and damaging row over its statue of Cecil Rhodes

THE head of the Oxford University college behind the Cecil Rhodes statue row has faced calls for her resignation after it emerged back office staff could be made redundant as a result of the fiasco.

Oriel College’s Provost Moira Wallace, a career civil servant, has been accused of a lack of leadership in allowing the row over the statue to drag on for months, causing several major donors to withdraw financial support.

MPs, academics and students were among those who said Ms Wallace should consider her own position rather than allowing blameless junior staff to lose their jobs.

As The Daily Telegraph disclosed yesterday, the college is to defy calls from student campaigners who wanted a statue of Rhodes – Oriel’s most famous benefactor – to be removed from a college building because of his white supremacist views. But the delay over the decision – and an attempt to mollify the Rhodes Must Fall campaign by announcing a consultation over the statue – has proved catastrophic. More than £100 million of gifts and bequests could be withdrawn because donors are furious the college considered taking the statue of the Victorian down.

Neil Carmichael, chairman of the Commons select committee on education, said: “I’m sympathetic to the view that Moira Wallace should consider her position. The college allowed this to spiral out of control and there should be some sense of responsibility for what has happened.”

Ms Wallace, 54, is no stranger to controversy. In 2013 she was given a “golden goodbye” worth £472,000 when she left her job as permanent secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. She walked into the job as Provost of Oriel, where her salary is not published, though college accounts show the highest-paid member of its governing body is paid £102,000.

Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University and former master of Wellington College, said: “Oriel has not shown leadership. Academic institutions should never be in this position, whipping up the past and desecrating what the past has left behind.”

The college has cancelled its annual fundraising drive because alumni would not be “well disposed” towards the institution. Its development director, Sean Power, said in a confidential memo to the governing body that he expected to raise £2 million in donations this year, half the normal amount, because of the Rhodes row. He said: “As such we will need to look at making cuts of up to £200,000 which will almost certainly involve one or two redundancies from our current team.”

Oriel College yesterday denied it was preparing to make redundancies.

Ntokozo Qwabe, leader of the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford movement, reacted with anger to the decision to save the statue, saying it “reminds us that black lives are cheap at Oxford”.

With some embarrassed throat-clearing, Oriel College has announced that it won’t, after all, be tearing down the statue of its controversial Victorian benefactor, Cecil Rhodes. A small knot of angry students had been demanding that the offending stonework be removed, because they suffered “violence” every time they had to walk past it. Rhodes, they said, was a racist, an imperialist and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Unbelievably, instead of telling them to mind their own business, the authorities at my former college launched a consultation exercise about the statue. The wholly unsurprising answer came back, from students and former students of all ethnic backgrounds, that the statue should stay. Most Orielenses understood, even if the protesters didn’t, that accepting a bequest in 1902, and honouring the benefactor, doesn’t mean endorsing his opinions today.

The anti-Rhodes campaigners found scant support, both in Oxford and beyond. Editors struggled to find contrarian columns, because most Left-wing pundits took the line that knocking down statues doesn’t, in itself, improve race relations.

In the end, the college authorities decided to cut short the consultation. In a statement on Thursday, phrased in the peculiar, tortured idiom of academic committees, they made clear that the guano-encrusted diamond magnate would stay: “The College believes the recent debate has underlined that the continuing presence of these historical artefacts is an important reminder of the complexity of history and of the legacies of colonialism still felt today. By adding context, we can help draw attention to this history, do justice to the complexity of the debate, and be true to our educational mission.”

The anti-statue students are now furiously alleging that Oriel caved in to money interests. Alumni, they said, appalled by the college’s cowardice, were cancelling their donations. And, in at least one case that I know of, that’s precisely what happened. But I somehow doubt that the suspension of my £30 a month direct debit was critical. Given the sheer weight of opinion, Oriel had little choice, and has belatedly come round to doing the right thing.

The activists, gathered under the comically portentous #RhodesMustFall hashtag, have come in for a great deal of criticism, not least because their most vocal proponent, a South African master’s student, Ntokozo Qwabe, is a Rhodes Scholar, and thus a beneficiary of the diamond magnate’s largesse.

Mr Qwabe has a tendency to overstatement, as students sometimes do. In the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, he declared: “I do NOT stand with France. Not while it continues to terrorise and bomb Afrika [sic] & the Middle East for its imperial interests.” When it was put to him that Nelson Mandela had been against removing statues of Rhodes, he airily dismissed the former president with: “My own experiences are as valid as Mandela’s.” Well, yes, although there is surely a difference between spending 27 years as a prisoner and studying law at Oxford.

Then again, few of us would like to be judged forever on the basis of things we say in our early twenties. I have no particular quarrel with Mr Qwabe – there will always be students protesting about something or other. But I do wonder what on earth possessed Oriel to take him seriously. An academic institution ought to have made a stand for proper history. It ought to have explained that judging past generations by present morality is a kind of narcissism, one that allows people to look down on dead heroes without actually doing anything.

It ought, indeed, to have vocally supported its former chaplain, the current Regius Professor of Theology, Nigel Biggar, who kept patiently explaining to anyone who would listen that, by the standards of his time, Rhodes was no racist: he enjoyed warm personal relations with Africans, campaigned against attempts by the Cape government in 1899 to take the vote away from the native peoples, and funded the newspaper of an organisation that was a forerunner of the ANC.

Oriel ought to have pointed out politely that, even if the protesters disagreed with all this, even if they believed that Rhodes was wicked, it was still not for them to demand that someone else’s statue be taken down. It should have added that, if they didn’t want to look at the Rhodes statue (which most people walk past without noticing, because it’s high up and out of the way), they could look at the pretty church across the road. It might even have told the students that accepting that there are different points of view is part of growing up.

But Oriel did not say any of these things. Instead of behaving like a place of learning, it behaved like the Equality and Diversity Officer at a far-Left local authority. It thereby created a wholly unnecessary row from which it has only now started to extract itself. Its students, present and former, emerge well from the whole business. Few others do.