I feel that some correspondents are missing a key point regarding the replacement of a poem by Kipling with one by Maya Angelou in the students’ union building at the University of Manchester (Letters, 21 July). This took place as part of the extensive and continuing refurbishment programme of the building being undertaken this summer. It is not the removal of some long-standing artwork on a university building.
It is entirely appropriate that the executive of the students’ union should decide whether or not the proposed text is suitable for display in the union building, and to take note of protests by the membership. I note that the executive accept that they were not as familiar with all the details of the proposed decorative aspects of the project as they should have been. In due course they will be held accountable both for that and the decision itself by the membership through the democratic structures, as they will be for all other aspects of the refurbishment. As a life member of the union I support their decision to install the text by Maya Angelou.
John Anzani
Musselburgh, East Lothian
• In his autobiography Something of Myself, Kipling wrote that his verses in If contained “counsels of perfection most easy to give … Schools, and places where they teach, took them for the suffering Young – which did me no good with the Young when I met them later … They were printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologised to weariness.”
Though possibly not for the same reason, I think he would have had some sympathy for the Manchester students who object to having their union decorated with If.
Richard Maidment
Bristol
• Rudyard Kipling was a man of his times, obviously: but would a genuine racist ever have come up with the line “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”?
Mike Wright
Nuneaton, Warwickshire
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
