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Mark Mercer

Cambridge is a case study in how to save free speech

Those who impose woke group-think on others should be lampooned, ridiculed and chased out

DOUGLAS MURRAY  8 June 2021 • 6:00pm  Douglas Murray

You have to grab your victories where you can in this life. And the Telegraph and – ahem – the present author ought to claim a small victory in one of the ongoing struggles of our time. As this newspaper has highlighted, one of the former jewels in the crown of our nation – Cambridge University – has recently been brought low by a banal and ill-equipped Canadian lawyer called Stephen Toope.

This Dickensian-named character has spent his time as vice chancellor trying to turn his Rolls Royce of an institution into yet another banal one of automatic group-think. A sort of Canadian bar association without the thrills. Or indeed the pay.

The latest Toope idiocy was his proposal for a “Change the Culture” initiative. Among other things this was meant to allow students and dons to inform anonymously on each other.

Specifically, the forum was going to encourage the reporting of so-called “micro-agressions”. These are in-the-eye-of-the-beholder insults so minute that they may in fact be wholly imaginary. Among the other things which Toope wanted to include as a reportable offence was the raising of an eyebrow by anyone at Cambridge while any member of a minority group was speaking.

Happily the forces of sanity have prevailed. In the wake of negative publicity Toope has had to beat an embarrassing retreat. Within days of his plans being made public, he issued a statement saying that portions of the proposals should never have been published, were “included in error” and that the website for aspiring informants everywhere would be taken down until further notice.

Mr Toope did not say that the dog had eaten his website. But other than that he produced the whole gamut of excuses. A first-year undergraduate would be ashamed to produce work as cruddy as Toope’s, or to make excuses so transparently lame.

It followed an earlier embarrassment for Toope. Late last year dons rejected his new speech “guidelines” for all members of the university. Toope tried to insist they show “respect” for other viewpoints. The dons rightly revolted, saying that the best they could muster for some idiocies would be “tolerance”. It was a masterclass.

For the time being the dons of Cambridge still tolerate the appalling Toope. But the backtracking forced upon him twice in a few months points to a small but important lesson in the cultural battles of our time.

The people who insist that they know everything to such an extent that they would dare to tell us which words we might use or which facial muscles we might twitch do not in fact know anything much. They are ill-informed, pompous bureaucrats who seem to regard academia as little more than a delicious and remunerative racket.

From Cambridge and a small number of other recent cases the rest of us have learnt some important lessons. We need to counter these people. We need (to use one of their own favoured phrases against them) to “call them out”. We need to question who the hell they think they are to force their stupid and semi-constructed dogmas on the rest of us. Let alone on some of the brightest people in the country.

We must lampoon them, ridicule them and chase them out. To adapt HL Mencken, we must heave dead cats into their supposed sanctuaries and go roistering on down the highways of learning.