page_title: Rhodes Must Fall
section_title: Oriel College at University of Oxford, UK
hierarchical_section_title: Rhodes Must Fall / Other universities / Oriel College at University of Oxford, UK
caption_attribution_description: English: The Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford, UK, has been focused upon this statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. This photo at the left is the High Street facade of the Rhodes Building at Oriel College. The photo at the right is a zoomed photo of the Cecil Rhodes Statue that adorns the facade.
context_page_description: Rhodes Must Fall was a protest movement that began on 9 March 2015, originally directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town that commemorates Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to "decolonise" education across South Africa. On 9 April 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed.
  Rhodes Must Fall captured national headlines throughout 2015 and sharply divided public opinion in South Africa. It also inspired the emergence of allied student movements at other universities, both within South Africa and elsewhere in the world.
context_section_description: At the University of Oxford, students called for a statue of Rhodes to be removed from Oriel College, and started a movement at the university to better represent non-white culture in the curriculum as well as to combat racial discrimination and insensitivity. Organising members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford stated that awareness should be raised at the university about the institution's implication in colonialism and the violence that accompanied it, and that representation of 'black voices' should be improved.
  Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Harry Mount described Oxford's Rhodes Must Fall campaign as the product of "a generation raised to believe that their feelings are all that matter", arguing that academics had been too indulgent towards student activists.
  Encyclopædia Britannica made this comment about Rhodes which explains the controversy: he "once defined his policy as 'equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi' and later, under liberal pressure, amended 'white' to 'civilized'. But he probably regarded the possibility of native Africans becoming 'civilized' as so remote that the two expressions, in his mind, came to the same thing.
  On 19 January 2016, students at the Oxford Union (a private student debating society, without official endorsement or links to the University of Oxford) voted 245 to 212 in favour of removing the statue of Rhodes. Ultimately, on 29 January 2016, it was announced that the statue would remain, after "furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million" if it was removed.
  Commenting on the Rhodes controversy, and a similar demand to remove Nelson's column due to slavery issues, the former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sir Roy Strong, stated: "Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won't be a statue or a historic house standing....The past is the past. You can't rewrite history."
  The legacy of Cecil Rhodes at The University of Oxford is far-reaching, as in his will Rhodes established The Rhodes Scholarships. Each year, some 100 international students are selected to study at Oxford under the scholarship that bears Rhodes' name. This scholarship is regarded as one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world. When some of those in receipt of the scholarship were challenged over their opposition to iconography of Rhodes in Oxford, they commented "this scholarship does not buy our silence" and that "...there is no hypocrisy in being a recipient of a Rhodes scholarship and being publicly critical of Cecil Rhodes and his legacy". This followed a number of criticisms by British media outlets, and on social media, against the scholarship holders Ntokozo Qwabe and Joshua Nott in response to their involvement in the movement. The students commented that "...a wave of ad hominem and unfounded accusations, hate speech and racism have flooded social media, the press and indeed Ntokozo’s personal inbox.".
  In June 2020, the issue was again brought to attention during the George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom. Two large Rhodes Must Fall protests occurred outside Oriel College, on High Street in central Oxford to call for the removal of the Rhodes statue from the Oriel building. The first protest occurred on the 9th of June 2020 and was attended by over 1000 people. The second protest occurred on the 16th of June and was a march from Cowley, a nearby suburb of Oxford, through to the Oriel College building on High Street and onto the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History. Both protests were peaceful. On the 17th of June 2020, some University of Oxford professors expressed opinions in support of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford. In particular, within a letter to The Telegraph, they criticised the University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson for claims she made concerning the Rhodes Must Fall movement engaging in the 'hiding of history'. In response to this, meetings of the Oriel College undergraduates, the Oriel junior common room (JCR), and the Oriel graduates, the Oriel middle common room (MCR),
caption: The High Street facade of Oriel College, Oxford, UK, with the Cecil Rhodes Statue magnified. This statue has been the focus of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford to date.
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