One of the most high profile and emotive higher education stories over the past year has been the furore over whether to tear down the statue of mining magnate and arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford.
The row over whether ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ has been inspired by the movement of the same name in South Africa, as well as Black Lives Matter campaigners in the United States, and has shown that a new global wave of identity politics and cultural conflict has arrived on UK campuses. Arguments over statues, ‘safe spaces’, no-platform, and the content of university curricula have become intensified by news organisations lust for clickbait and controversy. Yet as universities become less mono-gendered and mono-cultural, the discomfort at higher education’s continued dominance by white men will only increase. Rhodes, of course, did not fall, and the minuscule size of the black professoriate (85 at the last count) is an embarrassment to the sector. Rows over identity and power will be at the heart of higher education policy in the years to come, as Rhodes’s looming presence over the quad at Oriel only serves to remind us.
A new wave of student activism is shaking up higher education. Read more here.