Rhodes Must Fall campaigners won't disappear just because they lost

Don’t imagine that the campaign group ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ has gone away just because Rhodes didn’t fall. They’ve now issued a list of demands, including a call for Oxford to ‘acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing violence of empire’. And if America is anything to go by, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The US prides itself on taking free speech seriously but the leaders of its finest universities are in full retreat from undergraduates demanding the most dubious of corrections in the cause of progressive principles. And while Oxford’s chancellor, Chris Patten, and Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor, gamely told students to either grow up or take a hike, their Ivy League peers have been running up white flags at the first sign of trouble. No need to ask them to ‘recontextualise’ controversial iconography, as Oxford students demanded over Rhodes, they’ll happily rip the whole lot down for you – no questions asked.