Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum has decided to hide from display a West African mask, and online photos of it, because Igbo culture has a taboo against women seeing it. The decision is justified in the name of “cultural safety”.
The rot starts at the top. Museum curator Laura van Broekhoeven could have been invented by Andrew Doyle or planted by grievance studies hoaxers James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian. Though she obtained her PhD in 2002, she has only a smattering of largely uncited low-prestige publications to her name, none of which prevented her being made Professor of Museum Studies at Oxford in 2021. By comparison, Harvard’s deposed Claudine Gay, who has several well-cited publications in top journals, is a veritable superstar and paragon of rigour.
Perhaps van Broekhoeven has shot to the heights of academia because she has been showered with research grant funds as part of right-on curatorial projects such as “Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage” and “Taking Care: Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care”. She seems to have gravitated to the more censorious end of academic governance such as ethics and repatriation of objects committees, while her service to the DEI gods is especially impressive, taking in spells as Co-Chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network, a member of the Race Equality and Diversity Taskforce, and a member of the Museum Association Decolonisation Guidance Working Group.
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
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