More than 150 Oxford University academics are refusing to teach unless a statue of a controversial British colonial leader is removed — getting them ripped in Parliament as a “useless bunch” driven by “wokeness.”
The lecturers signed a “statement of a boycott of Oriel College” over the decision to keep a statue of Cecil Rhodes, who drove colonial expansion in southern Africa in the 1800s, and for whom the school’s Rhodes Scholarship is named, according to The Telegraph.
“Faced with Oriel’s stubborn attachment to a statue that glorifies colonialism and the wealth it produced for the college, we feel we have no choice but to withdraw all discretionary work and goodwill collaborations,” the lecturers’ statement said.
Reaction to the boycott threat came from as high up as Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose office said he expects “appropriate action” to be taken to make sure students are compensated for any cancelled classes.
“Students rightly expect to get a good deal for their investment in higher education,” his spokesperson told The Telegraph. “We fully believe in protecting academic freedom but universities have a duty to maintain access to good-quality tuition as a priority.”
The lecturers say they plan to refuse to teach Oriel’s undergraduates, help with outreach work or give talks or seminars “until Oriel makes a credible public commitment to remove the statue,” according to The Telegraph.
The boycott came as Oxford was already under fire after students at neighboring Magdalen College voted to remove a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II because she “represents recent colonial history.”
The leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, dismissed the Magdalen students as “a few pimply adolescents getting excited.”
As for the rebelling lecturers, he told Parliament, “I’m half tempted to say that you should be lucky not to be taught by such a useless bunch.”
“We must not allow this wokeness to happen,” he said, asking, “Why don’t they have any pride in their country, our marvelous history and our success?
“Rhodes is not a black and white figure, perhaps they’re not learned enough to have bothered to look up the history of Rhodes in any detail,” he said, calling him “a figure of importance and of interest and of enormous generosity to Oxford.”
MP Tom Hunt also asked Parliament to make “time for us to discuss what we can do to prevent the ‘wokification’ of Oxbridge colleges?”
Rhodes, who founded Rhodesia and served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in the 1890s, supported apartheid-style measures in southern Africa, The Telegraph said. He is also known for endowing the fund that supports the famous Rhodes Scholarship in 1903.
Students began the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign in 2015, but it was reinvigorated after other statues were toppled during Black Lives Matter protests last year, The Telegraph said.
Other Oxford academics called the boycott “pathetic” and “ludicrous,” The Telegraph said.
“The petition is clearly bonkers and the grown-ups around Oxford should know better,” one lecturer told the UK paper.
“It is crazy to take out their virtue-signaling on the Oriel undergraduates.”
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