So Cecil Rhodes looks set to fall. Last Thursday Oriel College announced its intention to remove a plaque commemorating its controversial benefactor, and to stage a “listening exercise” about dismantling his statue, which overlooks Oxford’s High Street.

Lobbied by the local manifestation of South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall movement, the college has publicly repudiated Rhodes’s “colonialist” and “racist” views, claiming they stand in “absolute contrast” to “the values of a modern university”, not least diversity and inclusion.

This is much more than a storm in a tea-cup. Oriel’s precedent will have international repercussions. At Princeton, for example, the university authorities have yet to respond to students who occupied its president’s office in November, demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be expunged from its school of public