A King’s College London Professorship hailing its name from Cecil Rhodes, 19th century British colonialist mining tycoon, educational benefactor, and founder of Rhodesia, has been abandoned over his ties with slavery and racism.
The 100-year-old Rhodes Professorship of Imperial History was terminated by the university after lobbying by its current holder, Richard Drayton.
Rhodes’ legacy has influenced Drayton’s academic life in more ways than one. Born in Guyana and raised in Barbados, Drayton studied at Harvard and Yale prior to winning the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholarship which brought him to Balliol College, Oxford. The sixth Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s stated: “the blood of enslaved Caribbean people is mixed into the mortar of [the university’s] foundations”.
In a letter written to the provost of King’s in 2020, released via a Freedom of Information request, Professor Drayton highlighted that the university was constructed using donations from people whose wealth could be traced back to enslavement and exploitation in the West Indies. As an example, he cited Charles Pallmer, who donated today’s equivalent of £40,000 to King’s in 1828 and at one point in his life, and made £400,000 off the backs of the 300 slaves he owned in Jamaica.
Speaking on the Professorship, he stated its cancellation would “begin a process of repair – repair of the world, repair of ourselves – to make a future world in which everyone can live as equals.” In addition to changing the Professorship, Drayton vouches for the giving of reparations from the university to the Caribbean and African diaspora.
King’s has responded by saying that since the Professorship was not linked to any funding from the Rhodes Trust, any reference to Rhodes could be discarded. A King’s spokesperson stated: “as we have not received funding from the Rhodes Trust for almost 100 years, the name of the chair was updated.” Furthermore, Drayton’s letter drove the College to kickstart the Harold Moody research studentships to aid students from underrepresented communities. Harold Moody was a Jamaican-born medic, anti-racism campaigner, and King’s alumnus.
Additionally Professor Drayton is a strong supporter of the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign which aims to take down statues of the imperialist, such as the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford. Just like King’s, Oxford has agreed to disband its Rhodes Professorship of Race Relations, although this decision still has to be passed by the Privy Council. For them, the university’s choice to remove the Professorship is a triumph.
However, the change also has its critics; Professor Jeremy Black, author and emeritus professor of history at Exeter University terming it “footling virtue signaling.”
