Imagine being forever judged for the stupid posters you had up aged twelve. Welcome to Oxford’s PC nightmare, you blunt worshipping Eminem enthusiast.

Life as a Cambridge student sure can be tough.

Whether we’re being shown up by supervision partners (telling us about your extra reading isn’t a question, Tom), mowed down by spandex covered cyclists for the sheer hubris of crossing the road, or trawling preachy Tab articles that desperately recycle “life in the bubble” references to fill out their intro, it feels like purposefully hating ourselves would be something to avoid.

Fortunately, as always, there’s another heroic movement of masochistic Oxbridge students fearlessly reminding us of how ashamed we should be for going here.

Rhodes Must Fall, the campaign to topple a hundred year old birdshit stained statue of noteworthy racist/psycho/probablecrabperson Cecil J. Rhodes, is about more than just petty jealousy of the moustache master race. At its heart, it’s a debate about the very nature of race relations and prejudice at Oxford.

And, as usual, the nonsense they get up to applies to us as well.

These campaigners seem sincere when they claim feelings of persecution, of a racially oppressive culture at Oxbridge. That’s tragic, disappointing, and deserves sympathy. It’s also misguided, unfair, and totally inaccurate.

Seriously, is it not enough that we’re already elitist pig-fuckers and transphobic sex offenders? Well no, apparently not, you aspiring plantation managers. Cambridge doesn’t publish stats disputing the first two, but the ethnic makeup of freshers at Cambridge is pretty clear: only 80% of students are white, which in a country that’s 87% white overall, is technically under-representation. Plus, three whole ethnic groups had a higher application success rate than the honkies. That’s a win in any hippie’s hemp-bound book.

Beyond just the racially prejudiced facts of the matter, the idea that there’s a racist culture at Oxbridge is just ridiculous. Seriously. This is probably the most liberal, tolerant, and inclusive place on the planet. Often annoyingly so. (And yeah, I’m talking about you PC social justice nuts. There’s no safe space from your own tragic lives.)

Sure, like at any uni, if you’re coloured, wear a hijab or dashiki, or even just sport a dashing black beard, you probably will encounter twats who yell dumb shit about “the muslamists”, and yeah, it’s a little more annoying because they’re rich, entitled, and have the dulcet RP accents of a gunboat admiral.

But you’ll also find a black student union president, dozens of prestigious societies with past and present BME leaders and officers, and a student body that is overwhelmingly both too tolerant and too overworked to care what you look like. Or sound like. Or your personality. Just leave us alone please, we’re reading.

Clearly, when campaigners tell us Oxbridge was built on white privilege, they’re totally right: Britain itself was built on the on the scarred backs and stolen minerals of Africa and India. But as much as the inclusive and tolerant modern British people aren’t defined by the small-minded racism of their deranged ancestors, Oxford and Cambridge aren’t defined by the architectural hangovers of their sad past.

At the end of the day, statues are just symbols, and symbols have as much meaning as we as a society choose to give them. A statue of Rhodes is nothing more than a pile of rubble, vaguely shaped into a miserable fat guy, because we don’t give his ideas any respect or thought.

The campaign to topple Rhodes is wrong, and it’s not just because of the fascist after-taste that comes with erasing history, or the deeply negative impact their rhetoric has on ambitious BME applicants who now see Oxbridge as neo-colonial. They’re trying to prove that a passionately tolerant, famously liberal ancient campus is defined by the details of its architecture.

Don’t let them tell you Oxbridge is racist. We live it, and we know it isn’t. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t know real racism, or is prepping for a wildly successful career as a CUSU PC thug.

And it’s probably the second one.