Rudyard Kipling: is he beyond the pale?

If there’s one area in which today’s students are consistent, said Tom Slater on Spiked, it’s their dogged commitment “to crushing evil where it doesn’t exist”. Two years after the asinine campaign at Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, our brightest and best are “raging” against another “long-dead colonialist”. In the stocks this time: Rudyard Kipling. As part of recent renovations at the University of Manchester, the Nobel Prize-winner’s perennially popular poem If was painted on a wall in the students’ union. That triggered an immediate backlash from the union’s leaders, who scrubbed off the offending piece and wrote in its place Still I Rise, by the black American poet Maya Angelou. Kipling, they righteously explained, was a “racist” who “stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment and human rights”.

How ridiculous to so contemptuously dismiss one of the country’s most celebrated writers, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail. Applying modern standards to judge people from previous eras is as foolish as it is pointless. To be fair, “Kipling has long been controversial”, said Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph. George Orwell denounced him as a “jingo imperialist” back in 1942; The White Man’s Burden, Kipling’s 1899 poem about the Philippines, was an “unambiguous call for imperial expansion”. But If itself isn’t colonialist in the slightest – and censoring inoffensive material because of the author’s other writing is surely a step too far. What if we applied the same rule to Shakespeare? Should Hamlet be “thrown out” because some people view The Taming of the Shrew as misogynistic?

Any drive for “retroactive purity” is misguided, agreed Janice Turner in The Times. But it has always been the role of the young to “re-evaluate the pantheon of national gods” – without that process, our culture would grow “stagnant”. Besides, we’re talking about students here. This was a case of the university’s permanent employees – i.e. the grown-ups – shoving something up on the walls without consulting the students beforehand. “Try putting posters of your favourite bands on a teenager’s bedroom wall and see how long they stay.”