The statue of Cecil Rhodes outside Oriel College, Oxford, which could be torn down

Halfway down the High Street in Oxford, amid the roaring buses and creaking bicycles, there stands a grand building in honeyed stone, built in 1911.

It belongs to Oriel College and was funded by one of the college’s most famous sons, the diamond magnate and empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, whose statue gazes down on passers-by.

By any standards, Rhodes was a titanic figure. As an entrepreneur in southern Africa in the last years of the Victorian era, he founded the De Beers mining company, became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and established a vast new British territory in Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Rhodes died in 1902, but his name lives on. Not only did he leave a handsome legacy to his old college, but his will also established the Rhodes Scholarships, which paid for brilliant young students from former British possessions to study at Oxford, among them the former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the recently ousted Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

So it is not hard to see why, a few years after his death, Oriel wanted to mark its gratitude with a statue on the building that bears Rhodes’s name, as well as a plaque outside his old college room.

Yet now, more than a century after his death, the college’s benefactor has become the target of an extraordinarily ignorant and self-righteous campaign, which marks a new low in campus political correctness.

After pressure from a rag-tag band of student activists who, with revealing pomposity, call themselves ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, the Oriel authorities have announced they intend to remove the plaque and are considering pulling down the statue, stating: ‘The College does not share Cecil Rhodes’s values or condone his racist views or actions.’

Student activists have been much in the news; almost every week brings a new attempt to ban a speaker who might hurt the poor darlings’ feelings.

Even by these standards, however, the campaign against Rhodes’s statue represents a ludicrous exercise in intellectual and historical vandalism. As for the college authorities; well, they should be ashamed.

I have no problem, by the way, with admitting that Cecil Rhodes was not a very nice man, but then genuinely important historical figures rarely are. It is rare, after all, that people put up statues of flower-arrangers.

As a fervent imperialist, Rhodes believed that the British were ‘the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’. To that end, he greased palms, bent rules and frequently fell back on the power of the Gatling gun.

He secured control of Rhodesia by effectively swindling the king of Matabeleland, and showed scant regard for his African employees, whom he dismissed as mere ‘n***ers’.

Yet Rhodes was no monster. Far from being some purple-faced reactionary, he was a keen Liberal and donated thousands to the Irish Nationalists. And in the Cape Colony, which he ran as a personal fiefdom, he removed many of the discriminatory laws against Dutch-speaking Afrikaners and even argued for Dutch to be taught alongside English.

A complicated human being, then, with a complicated legacy, but you would not know it from the hysterical hyperbole of Rhodes’s student critics, who want every trace of the man erased from Oxford’s history.

The activists’ manifesto makes for truly laughable reading. Whenever people walk past the statue, they claim, they ‘legitimise . . . celebration of a murderous white supremacist’. Students apparently feel ‘oppressed and marginalised’ by its presence.

So they have dedicated themselves to ‘freeing our curriculum and environments, decolonising them, and embedding them with essential mechanisms for awareness and acknowledgment of the atrocities of Colonialism and how its insidiousness ripples through our university today’.

Confused? Not sure if embedding the space with ‘mechanism for awareness’ goes far enough? Well, don’t worry, because the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is planning to ‘create networks of support for students experiencing oppression as a direct result of these paradigms’.

In a sane world, the university would have reacted by offering activists lessons in how to write plain English. Perhaps, as an act of kindness, it might have thrown in some tissues for students who can’t walk down the High Street without bursting into tears.

Alas, British academics are not renowned for their iron will and robust common sense. Even so, Oriel’s reaction strikes me as marking a new low in intellectual and moral cowardice. I knew that the college had gone downhill since the days of its alumnus, Sir Walter Raleigh, but I didn’t realise things were that bad.

No one disputes that by today’s standards, Rhodes had some distinctly unpleasant, indeed overtly racist, views. The key words there, though, are ‘by today’s standards’ and, in any case, he was far from alone.

His belief in the automatic superiority of the white race, disconcerting as it might seem today, was shared by most other well-known 19th-century figures. Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. president feted today for freeing millions of slaves, once said: ‘There is a physical difference between the white and black races that will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.’

As it happens, Lincoln’s statue stands in Parliament Square, alongside effigies of such other great historical figures as Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts (who was a prime minister of South Africa). Presumably the Rhodes Must Fall protesters think their statues should be pulled down, too.

That idea, by the way, is not as far-fetched as it might sound. In Amsterdam, the world-famous Rijksmuseum has begun rewriting the titles of its paintings in a more politically correct form, with ‘Young Negro Girl’ becoming ‘Young Girl Holding a Fan’.

The artist’s intentions, it appears, are irrelevant. All that matters are the feelings of a handful of visitors apparently too stupid to understand that people in the past had different attitudes from ours.

Oxford students have protested against the Cecil Rhodes plaque and statue, claiming he was a racist

The Oxford students protesting about Cecil Rhodes, by the way, can hardly claim to be Rhodes’s victims. Many of them owe him their education. In any case, their howls of anguish are no more coherent than a toddler’s tantrum.

Do they really feel ‘oppressed’, as they stroll down the streets of one of England’s most beautiful cities, on the way to their classes with some of our country’s finest minds? In that case, perhaps they should try talking to some of the people whose taxes fund their institution.

At the heart of all this, though, is a frankly breathtaking level of self-righteousness and arrogance. Who are they to think themselves superior to men and women who died before they were even born?

Part of the point of studying history, it seems to me, is to understand that people in the past were different. Not better, not worse; just different, with attitudes and values that we can barely comprehend.

So who are the Oxford protesters to presume themselves so virtuous and enlightened, and to dismiss their predecessors as mere bigots? Above all, who are they to give themselves the right to re-edit history and even to erase individuals from the architectural record?

From the students, a degree of moral self-righteousness is only to be expected. After all, student activists are usually fairly silly, ignorant, pretentious people, desperate to flaunt their principles from the nearest rooftop.

But what possessed the Fellows of Oriel College to abase themselves and to betray the intellectual principles they are supposed to uphold? Do they seriously think themselves so noble that they have the right to sit in moral judgment on the past, and worse, to vandalise their architectural legacy?

The irony is they would be the first to condemn IS for blowing up classical statues in Syria. But IS claims to be acting on principle, too, doesn’t it? So what makes the Oxford do-gooders sure they are so different?

The students ought to grow up. The university ought to grow a backbone.