Rhodes was pretty abhorrent in every aspect of his career and his character if you go by today's standards, and today's standards are the only ones we really have to go by. I'm no expert on the man but he only donated that money to Oxford scholarships in order to further his dream of an army of Anglo-Saxon supermen who would bring the twin gospel of Christianity and capitalism to the world's inferior benighted masses. His main legacy is not the Rhodes scholarship but the former nation of Rhodesia, a massive stretch of African territory which he conspired with top British statesmen and bankers to exploit of all its gold, to the extent of massacring any of its indigenous inhabitants who happened to take issue with that goal, and which subsequently took the South-African path of assuming a top-down racial hierarchy of white over black, exactly as Rhodes would have wanted.
That said... if I were a student at Oxford I wouldn't care about any darn statue. In fact it is good that history be represented, and as Rhodes is actually a historically significant figure in some respects I believe his statue belongs there.
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