They’re seats of learning,
offering their students the promise of a better, more educated life.
But universities aren’t charities
working selflessly to make the world a better place.
They’re businesses, reliant on students for funding.
Which means that many of the UK’s most prestigious universities
have connections to some very unpleasant individuals.
People like slave traders and slave owners,
who used these historic universities to whitewash their reputations.
And it’s not always as easy as taking a statue down.
It goes much, much deeper than that.
Empires of Dirt,
a show about Europeans getting rich at the expense of everyone else.
Previously, we found out how the Tobacco Lords of Scotland got rich
and how the objects you see in museums were looted.
[Universities]
Picture this:
you’re a young Black student.
You work hard getting top grades,
so you win a place at Oriel College, Oxford.
And then on your first day of university—
where you’re paying £9,000
for the privilege of studying at one of the world’s greatest institutions—
you see a statue of this guy,
Cecil Rhodes, confirmed racist and white supremacist.
It's not exactly a welcome party.
Rhodes is considered to be the founder of
the colonies of Southern and Northern Rhodesia
in what is now modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia.
He was an avowed racist,
so much so that he was admired by none other than Hitler,
a co-sign from probably the biggest racist of all time.
Rhodes considered the English to be a “master race”
and once said that “the more of the world we inhabit,
the better it is for the human race.”
He was fabulously wealthy
on account of the diamond company he founded, De Beers,
which still exists today.
He staffed these mines by introducing a labor tax in 1894
that forced young African men to seek dangerous employment
in order to pay these tax bills.
At the mines, they were made to live in closed compounds
that were fenced off and guarded.
Their bosses were so paranoid about diamonds getting stolen
that they were subject by law to degrading strip searches—
something that white workers weren’t made to put up with.
This system of semi-forced labor
is said to have laid the foundations for apartheid in South Africa.
When Rhodes died in 1902, he left two percent of his estate to Oriel,
where he had once been a student.
As a sign of gratitude,
the college built a statue of him in his honor.
Cut to 2015, when students at Oxford and the University of Cape Town
began calling for their statues of Cecil Rhodes to be taken off campus.
A protester in Cape Town even threw a bucket of **** on one.
A month after the dirty protest,
Cape Town took down their statue.
But despite pressure from
the Rhodes Must Fall campaign and students,
Oriel refused to budge.
In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter movement,
the campaign started picking up steam again.
In June, thousands of people gathered outside Oriel
demanding the removal of the statue.
The college now says it wants to take it down,
but not before an independent inquiry.
It looks like, finally, Rhodes just might fall.
Slavery helped to construct
the incredible building you see behind me right now.
In 1710, slave owner and sugar magnate Christopher Codrington
passed on part of his fortune to All Souls College, Oxford.
His family owned plantations in Antigua and Barbados.
That wealth helped establish
the library that still bears his name.
All Souls has been grappling with his legacy ever since.
In 2018, a plaque commemorating the lives of enslaved people
was installed at the library entrance.
All Souls has also established a scholarship
for Caribbean graduate students to come to Oxford.
But it’s still called the Codrington Library,
and a statue of him still stands in the building.
It’s not just Oxford.
At Cambridge,
Jesus College holds its annual Rustat Feast every December.
It’s in honor to Tobias Rustat,
whose £2,000 donation in 1671—
about the equivalent of half a million pounds in today’s money—
made it possible for the orphaned sons of Anglican clergymen
to go to university.
Not the women, obviously.
Jesus didn’t let them in till the 70s.
Until 2019, guests at the dinner
would literally raise a glass to the man directly responsible for
the misery of thousands of enslaved people.
Rustat was a pioneer in the transatlantic slave trade.
He was a major investor in the Royal African Company,
which trafficked more African people to the Americas
than any other British institution.
Over half a century,
they condemned close to 150,000 people
to a lifetime of slavery.
Understandably, Cambridge is now conducting a two-year inquiry
into the university’s shady links with slavery.
It’s a pattern that repeats itself
across some of the oldest universities in the UK.
The University of Glasgow received the equivalent of £198 million
from people who derived their wealth from the slave trade.
Glasgow wasn’t all bad.
Some of its professors were involved in
the 18th century abolitionist movement.
But some good doesn’t outweigh all the bad.
Robert Cunningham Graham
was the rector of the University of Glasgow in the 18th century.
He was a planter, which basically means a slave owner.
By 1784, he’d enslaved 51 people.
While he was rector,
he continued to receive an income from his estate in Jamaica.
Ironically, for someone who enslaved people his whole life,
he was big on the idea of political liberty, and even established
an essay competition for students on the topic.
It’s just a shame he couldn’t extend those ideals
to the people who toiled to make him rich.
You’d think that we’d have moved past this.
That we wouldn’t celebrate tyrants
and people who trafficked human beings
with fancy libraries and carefully preserved statues.
Colonialism and white supremacy
is part of the history of many of the UK’s finest universities.
They don't put that bit in the prospectus, but it's the truth.