Woke student puritans care more about themselves than history
IThe idea that a dusty plaque now counts as ‘glorifying’ slavery is almost laughable
They’re after just one thing: making a ruckus and winning a virtue contest while they do so
was an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, in the very early 2000s. While I vaguely understood that there were a small number of Christians in college, nobody in my extended circles gave much thought to religion of any kind. Nobody I knew went to the chapel, let alone looked closely at its interior: they were too busy drinking dreadful mixtures of Ribena and cider.
When it comes to the ecclesiastical enthusiasm of Jesus College students, much has changed. Nothing, it seems, can upset them more than the precise make-up and positioning of old church artefacts. Whereas previously few people under the age of 60, bar the most exceptional scholars, theologians or spiritualists, ever combed over every plaque or grave in a consecrated place, now it seems that’s all Cambridge undergraduates can think about.
An all-consuming row is underway about the presence of a memorial plaque in the college chapel of Tobias Rustat, the 17th-century Cambridge benefactor buried there. Rustat (1606-1694) was particularly generous in his donations to Jesus College, providing for scholarships for Anglican clergymen – Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Rustat scholar. Rustat was also an investor in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In a remarkable escalation, the row about the plaque proceeded to the consistory court, which deals with church-related matters of law, with a dramatic hearing in the college chapel last week.
How did the students get wind of the offending plaque’s presence? One imagines them patrolling the chapel at all hours, Google Pixel phones to hand, ready to strike. In fact, they were alerted to it by the college’s zealous Legacy of Slavery Working Party, which “is currently involved in a process of critical self-reflection on the long-term legacies of slavery and colonial violence”.
They lost no time in entering the frenzied emotional state that has become their trademark. They are offended! They are upset! They feel sick! They cannot possibly live in the same college, let alone attend the same chapel, in which a plaque of this benefactor hangs, however quietly.
The band of outraged students is supported by Sonita Alleyne, college master and exacting “decolonisation” enthusiast, who recently presided over the return of the college’s Benin bronze cockerel to Nigeria. “How much sin do you have to have before you come off the wall?” she dramatically asked in the hearing.
But the outraged Jesuan students are as sloppy as they are furious. In no fewer than 21 emails, the students repeated the formulation that: “It’s wrong for the statue of someone who was so heavily involved in the horrific crimes of slavery to be glorified in our community.”
The idea that a dusty plaque now counts as “glorification” is almost laughable. More to the point, Rustat can hardly be said to be “so heavily involved” in slavery. At the time of his death, his holdings in the Royal African Company accounted for 1.7 per cent of his total worth – a pretty poor return on “heavy” involvement.
And as those opposing the plaque’s removal have pointed out, involvement in slavery at the time, however abominable we recognise it to be now, was as respectable as it was widespread. If we are to rip down everything connected to ideas we now know to be wrong, like institutionalised sexism, homophobia, child-beating and so on, where will it end?
The madness at Jesus College fits within a broader mania that seems particularly strong at Cambridge. There’s the ongoing grief about Churchill College and its apparent celebration of a man that some noisy dons and students would have us think of primarily as a racist.
Students have called for the history faculty’s Seeley Library to be renamed because Sir John Seeley, made regius professor of history in 1869, defended the British Empire.
Since the dawn of critical race theory and the campaign to decolonise the culture, all sorts of previously trivial things, things that were always just a part of the furniture and nobody but hobbyists gave a second thought to, have met with ferocious attention and scalding ends – from statues to the names of buildings.
Last week, Mary Beard, timely as ever, weighed in on the toppling of the statue of philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. Her argument, in different hands, could have been powerful – calling on the topplers to consider their own links to forms of slavery.
“Maybe we ought to look harder at ourselves,” she declared. “As well as deploring Colston, we might look at our own weak spots.”
She meant the exploitation of workers in foreign factories and explained how, gleefully tweeting pictures of the protesters dragging the statue away, she later realised the phone in her hand had been made in unacceptable conditions in Asia.
But her point is the polar opposite of what it ought to have been. It’s not so much that tearing down plaques and monuments of people beyond the pale by contemporary standards should make us feel guilty about our iPhones (unless doing so will actually help workers’ conditions). It’s that it should make us see the statue and plaquetearing for what it is: complete lunacy. Hubris, historical arrogance, fundamentalism and purism.
The reality is, none of the undergraduates demanding the removal of the Rustat plaque, or the renaming of the Seeley Library, really care about chapel furnishings or the history faculty’s name. If their morality was so exacting, perhaps they would get rid of their smartphones.
They won’t. Because they’re after just one thing: making a ruckus and winning a virtue contest while they do so. None of this has anything to do with either history, or making today’s world better. On the contrary.