Patten criticism of Cecil Rhodes campaign 'scandalous'

One of the founding members of the campaign to move the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Oxford to a museum says Lord Patten’s response to the campaign is “scandalous”.

Lord Patten, the university’s chancellor, told the Today programme that if Oxford students did not demonstrate a “generosity of spirit” towards history and respect for the principle of free speech “they should think about being educated elsewhere”.

But Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, an international relations student at Oxford, said the campaign was “doing exactly what Lord Patten says a university is for.”

“The notion that Cecil Rhodes should be un-reflexively glorified… we think is no longer tolerable,” he told the Today programme.