Why are delusions so contagious? This is a question I have been asking myself since the terrible news of Jason Arday’s death. Some people seem intent on sustaining the fictional worlds he created for himself, even now.

Journalist Peter Jukes is still claiming the former professor really did run “all those marathons”; and that the plagiarism charges relate only to “a couple of citation errors” in his PhD. To maintain this, Jukes is apparently inspecting wafer-thin slices of evidence — an old press report here, a potentially partisan internal university investigation there — while carefully bypassing reams of more relevant material.

Others are maintaining Arday’s own accusation that his minority ethnicity was the only plausible reason for all the press interest. They are obsessing over the fact that a disgruntled race scientist first exposed the scandal, ignoring the detailed findings of more neutral journalists since. They also disregard a blindingly obvious alternative explanation: Arday was presented as a national treasure by the establishment, entirely because of his astonishing backstory and publication record. This meant that the unraveling of that story, and those publications, were always going to be big news.

It’s true that we can’t know for sure whether a white Oxbridge professorial chair who boasted of incredible feats, advised governments, hosted BBC series, and acted as a judge on the Pride of Britain Awards would get identical amounts of coverage, were serious cracks in his career edifice then revealed. It seems likely, though, if only because of intense public fascination with the mad shit that goes down at universities. Millions of young people are, or recently have been, students, acquiring huge debts along with all those fancy long words. Most of them have financially implicated parents. Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to be an intellectual pinnacle. Why wouldn’t the country be gripped by the strange tale of a dreaming professor among the dreaming spires?

More from this author

Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

To avoid such conclusions, you would have to retcon Arday’s earlier life, omitting all the plaudits and depicting him as a minor boffin whom no one ever heard of before Nathan Cofnas wrote about him. Equally, to keep believing that the press attention was a “racist feeding frenzy” — recent words of Cambridge University Chancellor, Chris Smith — you have to forget that blackness was constantly brought into the conversation by Arday and his various backers in happier times, as a defining feature of his inspiring ascent (“world’s youngest ever black Cambridge professor” and all that). Once you acknowledge that context, it becomes reasonable to wonder whether the later mentions of Arday’s race by critics simply parrot the earlier mentions by fans. Or perhaps commentators are illustrating a wider thesis: that it is a bad idea to let impressions of a person’s abilities be swayed by facts about their skin color, black or white. Admittedly, this is a Right-wing position now, to the great shame of the Left; but it only counts as viciously racist if you are nuts.

In death as in life, then, misleading narratives are being built around Jason Arday. There is a sense of people staring doggedly at small sections of the picture, while averting their eyes from the complicated whole. Some of them are presumably sticking with his version of things out of grief or loyalty; but others seem determined to keep him in the symbolic realm for murkier reasons, erasing huge chunks of actual biography in the process.

From those on the other side, there have also been gleeful distortions of the truth. One is a tendency to depict the man as a deeply cynical fraudster. There is a boringly predictable urge here to demonize the ideological enemy to the max. Yet according to posthumous testimonies from acquaintances, Arday was kind, friendly, enthusiastic, and a bit eccentric; not someone sociopathic at all. His heroic anecdotes about overcoming difficulty — by now amply described elsewhere — were so silly and easily disprovable, the details wandering so wildly from one interview to the next, it beggars belief there was any kind of devious masterplan at work. Indeed, it is this version of Arday that indicts his employers and publishers. Had he been a smooth and accomplished conman, undetectably working the system, they would be more easily excused now.

Before Arday’s resignation, I wrote a piece charging university managers and others with having ignored his unfitness for an academic role, and so using him in a way that was not ultimately in his interests, though it was in theirs. I still believe this; but now concede that it, too, is part of a bigger picture. Bending the truth was a habit of mind that probably made him horribly vulnerable to the destruction of his imaginary worlds. He told stories about himself like his life depended on it — in research, in interviews, in motivational speeches — and there are hints of shame in the desperate way he tried to suppress the discovery of his plagiarism using lawyers and the police. Perhaps colleagues of Arday suspected that a dose of reality would hurt him, and found it too hard to point the self-deceptions out.

Most of us have met an adult who can’t stop inventing. It is rude and humiliating to confront someone like this about it, and especially when you sense that they require the fantasies — and your pretend belief in them — to carry on. I’ve done it once in my life, and it was very uncomfortable. On another occasion, I have smiled and nodded along. In some jobs or friendships, you can ignore the fact a person can’t stop spinning incredible yarns, because there are no obvious downsides to doing so; it doesn’t interfere with anything else that matters. Part of Arday’s tragedy was that his incredible yarns were not only humored by colleagues (one assumes); some of them were treated as central to his professional biography, and he kept rising higher and higher on the strength of the remarkable impression being conveyed. In a profession whose main mission requires epistemic reliability, it was only a matter of time before disaster would strike.

Suggested reading

Jason Arday: a question of academic standards

By Richard Dawkins

There is a case, then, for saying that English middle-class embarrassment contributed to Jason Arday’s downfall. Had his colleagues been the sort to call out fibs in the work canteen, perhaps he might have survived. To finally have reality pointed out so clinically by journalists from Left to Right, in full view of everyone who had ever adulated him, must have been a devastating experience. Those who had previously helped sustain him in his illusions could shuffle away from the spotlight. He could not.

There were other factors too, of course. It is daft to think that there is a simple causal or moral path that led to Arday’s untimely death; and the search for a scapegoat now unfolding on both sides of the culture war feels absurdly punitive and crass. It is one thing to ask who was responsible for Arday’s employment in an elite university, or his memoir deal; or indeed, to ask who or what caused him to resign so miserably. It is another thing to confidently assign blame for his suicide as a point-scoring exercise against characters you already hate. Those casually flinging this verdict around are not serious people. They themselves like comforting delusions too much.

Delusions are contagious, I think, because the more that people play fast and loose with facts, in a university or anywhere else, the less incentive there is for others to play by the rules. Sometimes it is easier and more profitable to float off into a world you constructed rather than stick with the real thing. Arday was an extreme case, but there is plenty of it about.

There is, though, another lesson to be drawn here, about the difficulty of delivering truth to a person who is radically self-deceived. Sometimes it is just easier to become half-deluded too. Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge — universities, media organizations, publishing houses — are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought. We need to help them face reality.

There was just one problem. None of it was true. She never worked in an Indian slum or as a sex educator. She was not Jewish. None of her relatives died in the Holocaust. She had conjured up 22 Holocaust victims out of thin air, giving them Jewish-sounding names, and depositing falsified information about them at Yad Vashem. “Rachel” didn’t exist. “My daughter has many realities,” her real, living mother explained to a journalist. “I only have access to one.”

Hingst had spent years weaving a web of lies. Readers of her blog gradually began to notice small inconsistencies. Doubts started to grow. In 2019, an exposé in Der Spiegel took a wrecking ball to the whole edifice that she had carefully built up. A month later she killed herself. She was 31.

Sophie Hingst did not deserve to die. Neither did Jason Arday. We all know the mythology that now attaches to the former Cambridge professor, found dead at his home on Friday: the plagiarism, the marathons, the nonverbal autism, the brain tumor, the illiteracy, the armed intruder, the pig’s head. But beneath it all — if it needs to be said — was a man, a father, whose death marks a horrible end to a sorry tale.

Already the blame game has begun. The Labour MP Dawn Butler has written to IPSO accusing the press of a “harassment campaign”. “Many of us believe that Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail, and Spectator”. (It is worth noting that the most damning investigation of Arday, the one that really brought things to a head, was published by The Guardian, a newspaper which Butler wrote for just a few days ago.) The Prime Minister has invited us to spend a moment “reflecting on how things came to this”. Mary Beard similarly urges “taking a break from any discussion of Cambridge’s policies” in order to “remember with compassion the person who paid a dreadful price”. Thus she deftly forecloses any possibility that “reflection” might end up indicting the university for its part in the fiasco.

More from this author

JD Vance's convenient Catholicism

By Samuel Rubinstein

In attempting such reflection on Arday, however, and on the events of the past month in the light of their tragic conclusion, we quickly run into a problem: we are bad at thinking about suicide.

I first became aware of that when I was at school. One of the older, un-PC teachers announced to the class that, due to some diktat from the higher-ups, he would no longer mark our homework with a red pen. “Apparently if I do,” he said, “you’ll kill yourselves.”

From there it was a short step toward saying that the marks themselves, and not just the color of ink they were made out in, should be shaped by an overbearing consciousness of suicide. That, sure enough, is the governing mindset in education today. Universities take a slacker approach to deadlines; discussion of in-person, closed-book exams — a pressing issue in the age of ChatGPT — is stifled by the fear that they would pile on to the already weighty burden on anxious student minds.

The word “suicide”, as this serves to show, has an extraordinary coercive power. But it has to be handled with tremendous care, not least because it can be a contagious act. This is difficult terrain, but the Samaritans provide a helpful guide. They wisely caution us, for example, against speculating about the motivations for a given suicide, or ascribing it to a single cause. Suicide tends to resist neat rationalization.

That didn’t stop Teachers’ Unions blaming Ofsted, and indeed the very notion of applying rigorous standards to schools, for the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2023. Nor does it stop the constant invocation of suicide in the debate over gender transition in children. Such rhetoric explicitly intends to shut down debate. When Kathleen Stock spoke at the Oxford Union, an activist glued herself to the floor wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan, “No more dead trans kids.”

This logic is not confined to one part of the political spectrum. Pete Newbon was a lecturer in English literature at Northumbria University. He was a director of Labour Against Antisemitism and a passionate critic of Jeremy Corbyn. In 2021 a Twitter spat with the Left-wing children’s author Michael Rosen caused his employer to be inundated with complaints. Issued with a final warning, and while embroiled in a separate legal case concerning his behavior online, he took his own life. Some fellow anti-Corbynites suggested that Rosen and his allies were to blame, thus turning a complex case into a political cudgel.

Suicide is a tragedy. It is not an argument. It is not a good argument, in any case. It turns political disagreement into a hostage situation. In ordinary personal relations we would call this manipulative, even abusive. Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans, understood as much, and knew just how to deal with it. A client once rang him up, threatening that she would kill herself if he didn’t make time for her there and then. “You do that, sweetie,” he replied, “and I’ll find out where you’re buried and come and piss on your grave.” Harsh as it may seem, this was the compassionate thing to say. Varah refused to suspend his usual rules and standards to make a special case. He did not want to give the vulnerable woman the impression that her suicide threats would have their desired impact, and thereby risk encouraging her to act on them.

That the risk of suicide can be used as a means of censorship is, in Arday’s case, no mere hypothetical. Last year, a police officer called a journalist investigating Arday — an act for which the Met has since apologized — advising him to cease and desist for the sake of Arday’s mental health. There is, however, a balance to be struck between taking such a risk seriously and allowing it to place legitimate scrutiny off limits. The suggestion now being made by Butler and others is that this police officer was right all along: that the risk of suicide — a risk which sadly materialized — ought to have put the whole matter to bed for good. Tragically, the attempt to suppress scrutiny carried risks of its own: once the scandal did break, it concerned not only his academic integrity but a serious and heavy-handed cover-up.

It risks being forgotten that there were very good public interest reasons for the Arday story to have garnered so much attention. Somehow, the story damned everyone. The police, for serving as a Cambridge professor’s personal goon-squad. British libel law for elbowing out the Times Higher Education and leaving Arday in the maw of Nathan Cofnas. The fields of sociology and education, which allowed him to ascend to the top of the profession and exalted his work as “the best in the world”. The roster of universities, which patted him through without bothering to apply standards or even to check that his work was his own.

Cambridge comes out particularly badly. They appointed him to a post for which he seemed manifestly unsuited. Having spent years waving him around as a mascot, they dumped him once the details of the case, which they ought to have known all along, made him more embarrassing than he was worth. They had a stronger interest than anyone in personalizing what most of the press understood to be a much wider scandal: they were the ones who suggested that Arday was sui generis, an “aberration”. The story invited questions about all those things and more. None of those questions has gone away.

More from this author

Jews don't feel safe anywhere

By Samuel Rubinstein

Those are among the reasons the affair has dominated the headlines for an unusually long time. Some of it might also be because it is “silly season”. Some of it, too, can be explained by the sheer scale of the fantasy, each revealed falsehood more outlandish than the last.

It could have been otherwise: if the Times Higher Education had been able to report the story as intended, this exposé might have looked more like the Observer’s impressive investigation last year of Raynor Winn’s Salt Path.

Instead, the story unfolded in agonizing slow-motion, with Arday and those around him having to attempt live damage control (sometimes contradicting each other) as his life came crashing down. The press was relentless — one can only imagine the effect of a drip-fed character assassination on a vulnerable psyche. Here, perhaps, the straightforward demolition of his fantasies by the Guardian was, if anything, more distressing than the litany of anti-DEI columns — precisely because the details of the matter were damning enough.

Arday’s eventual resignation of his professorial chair might have thrown some cold water on the scandal, at least as it related to him personally. But then the scandal was kept alive by Simon & Schuster’s decision to publish his memoir, encouraging legions of readers to go through his made-up stories with a fine-tooth comb. At the time of writing, it still hasn’t been pulled.

When Sophie Hingst killed herself in 2019, Der Spiegel came under immense pressure. The media in Ireland, where she lived, tended toward the view that Hingst was vulnerable, her wrongdoing victimless, and Der Spiegel out of order. But Der Spiegel held their nerve. They stuck to a solid principle: investigative journalists cannot be cowed by the fear that their subjects might kill themselves. The mental health of any fabulist will suffer when their webs come unspun. The deaths of Hingst and Arday are tragic. But they cannot retrospectively make reporting illegitimate.

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

Now, you might well think that Arday’s is an open and shut case. After all, the evidence that he has committed extensive plagiarism, in his PhD thesis and at least two published articles, seems overwhelming.

Nonetheless the university’s response has been not only to defend Arday to the hilt, including a blanket dismissal of any claim of wrongdoing, but also to accuse anybody raising questions about him of racism. As of writing, Cambridge seems to be standing by its earlier statement that any questions are part of a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility”.

Okay, this much is widely known already. But what non-academics probably don’t know is the flip side of the story. And to understand why this affair has sent British academia into various shades of doolally, it helps to know where this all came from. You need to know about Nathan Cofnas, the man whose blog broke the accusations of plagiarism, unleashing the firestorm.

Although he is now employed at the University of Ghent in Belgium, Cofnas was previously a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher based in Cambridge. Here we need to tread carefully. Cofnas was not employed by the University of Cambridge. That was his host institution, but he was funded by Leverhulme. However, while he was based in Cambridge, Cofnas had a College Research Associate affiliation with Emmanuel College (a separate entity from the university). This is a lot less fancy than it might sound: it basically gave him the right to put the College’s name on his personal website, and volunteer to do free work for them.

However, things exploded spectacularly when undergraduate students at Emmanuel discovered Cofnas’s personal Substack. We will come back to this in a minute, but what they read, they concluded to be racist. The students campaigned for him to lose his affiliation, and in the end he did. He later tried to take the college to court, but lost. (From what I hear, his attempt to paint Emmanuel as a hotbed of woke lunacy fell a bit flat, given that the Master of the College is currently Lieutenant General Douglas Chalmers.)

So, one major problem lurking in the background of the Arday story is that the first person to publicly accuse him of plagiarism, and trigger the current shitshow, is a man who has serious beef with Cambridge, and around whom suspicions of racism already swirl. To say that this is not helpful for those who are purely (and genuinely) concerned with the plagiarism angle alone is an understatement. If you read the mainstream news reporting on this affair, you will also not see Cofnas’s name coming up very often. I suspect that this is no accident: it’s kind of awkward to deflect accusations of racism if you are drawing on information provided by somebody recently accused of… racism.

Suggested reading

Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

But maybe we should back up a second. After all, is Cofnas a racist? Things get tricky here. He himself will tell you that he is “a race realist” who subscribes to “hereditarianism”. By this, he contends that in terms of statistical distributions across large populations, people of different races on average exhibit different characteristics. And, crucially, that this is not a product of socialization, history, or culture — but is more or less hardwired into underlying DNA.

To some extent, this claim is uncontroversial. It is true that populations distributed across East Africa for tens of thousands of years now tend to produce humans that are the best at running marathons. Something similar is true regarding Jamaicans and sprinting (although for very different historical reasons). Where it gets controversial is that “race realists” like Cofnas think that the same is true of IQ. On the one hand, they will smugly tell you, it’s just true that East Asians are better at math than European whites. But what they also want to tell you is that it’s just true that black Africans have lower IQs, on average, than everybody else. And the reasons for this, they say, are hardwired genetic differences.

Does this make Cofnas a racist? He would say no. He would say it makes him a realist, somebody who refuses to shy away from scientific fact.

A little while ago, before I ever heard of Jason Arday, I went away and read some of Cofnas’s published academic work. And here’s the thing: the scholarly quality is high. The first piece I read was a complex argument about our evolutionary history, and the constraints this imposes on morality. Not only was it good, I agreed with the argument. But this had absolutely nothing to do with race.

So I turned to his much more controversial philosophical defense of race realism as a legitimate scholarly inquiry. There he claims that the best explanations for variation in IQ are ultimately genetic, and that until social science accepts this fact, we will inevitably do bad social science. And the truth is, I’m not at all surprised that it passed the rigors of peer review at a proper academic journal. In this case, I had quite a lot of objections to his argument, but it was without doubt serious work. Whatever else you might say about Cofnas, the man is no intellectual fraud.

Suggested reading

What’s the point of the University?

By Wessie du Toit

And then I read the blog.

The careful, rigorous, circumspect scholar I had discovered was nowhere to be seen. Instead, dreary pages of sloppy ranting: edgelord ragebait of the sort that abounds in the bowels of Reddit. There, you can find claims such as “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” if genuinely color-blind criteria were applied. That “blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students” if they had to compete on equal terms for admission. Lots of denunciations of “woke”, plus armchair fantasies about how to usher in a hereditarian utopia. You get the idea.

Was Cofnas being an outright racist in his Substack musings? No. But sometimes, that’s not enough to clear the bar.

Should Emmanuel College have ended their affiliation with him? I’m genuinely torn. On the one hand, his personal blog is what academics and lawyers refer to as “extramural speech”. He wasn’t publishing it under anybody’s name but his own. Insofar as we think (and I do) that individuals should have free speech to say pretty much whatever they want in a private capacity, then as tasteless as his blogs were, Emmanuel should’ve just ignored them.

On the other hand, there is a case for saying that Emmanuel College is basically a glorified private club. And there’s no legal or moral obligation for private clubs to tolerate as members people they deem to be assholes. I have never met Cofnas in person. But if his internet persona is anything to go by, he seems a real asshole.

The result of all this is that British academia finds itself in a summer of farce.

Yes, we have what appears to be a fraudster and plagiarist, and indeed a serial fantasist. Both he and his employer shamelessly play the race card when anybody tries to question the very obvious holes in his story. This would be bad enough because many in academia watching this, if they are being honest, can tell by now that he is obviously not up to the job. It’s not just the accusations of plagiarism, it’s that his record is so obviously paper-thin that most academics couldn’t have got that position simply based on the CV. We all know damn well (even if only some of us will admit it in public) that politics and PR were crucial in this appointment.

The problem is, the first person to publicly accuse Arday has indeed been accused of being a racist — thereby vindicating his defenders up to a point. And Cofnas also has an axe to grind with Cambridge, which has allowed Arday’s defenders to underplay his (overwhelmingly plausible) claims.

Which leads us to another uncomfortable truth. Just last week, the Telegraph was using this affair as evidence that all the universities are broken “and hence maybe it is time to pack the whole thing in”. This belief that the universities are basically a scam on the public dime is growing, and Arday, with more than a little help from Cofnas, has added fuel to the fire.

The trouble is, significant portions of the humanities and social sciences have given up on serious scholarly inquiry, coming to see themselves primarily as activists, torchbearers for moral and political revolution. I know, because I’ve heard the mutterings about my status as an evil apologist for colonialism and racism due to my insistence that it’s good for students to read some of the books by some of the dead white men (but not only books by them!).

The result is an absurd situation where people who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to the fearless pursuit of truth do not know where to turn. Those of us who genuinely believe in the pursuit of knowledge, via the rigors of scholarship, are of course appalled by the Arday fiasco. Not simply because of the facts themselves, but because we know this is going to affect more than him, and more than Cambridge.

The knives are being sharpened, and it won’t only be the bullshit merchants who’ll suffer when the backlash comes. Likewise, one can only feel sympathy for serious scholars from ethnic minorities who will now be harmed by the spillover. But it would be a bad idea for us to therefore get in bed with Cofnas (who seems to think that until they adopt hereditarianism, universities are a write-off due to “woke” takeover). Likewise, his fellow travelers on the populist Right, who already seem out to destroy us.

During this long, dry summer of ’26, British academia has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. But a storm is coming. And when it hits, it is unlikely to leave either the rocks or the hard places where they were.

One might, therefore, feel relief at the proposal to abandon the targets for state-school admission that Cambridge University has been pursuing in recent years, currently set at 69%. In fact, the state-school intake now exceeds 70%, and it was always an extremely crude instrument of measurement. This is part of a broader mulling-over of Cambridge’s admissions procedure for undergraduates, which is always a challenge: nearly 30 colleges admit students independently, and they all jealously guard their autonomy against any attempt to centralise the process.

The general new idea is to concentrate on the contextual criteria that are also applied, such as the receipt of free school meals, poorly rated schools and other evidence of social and economic disadvantage. But as worthy as this sounds, a new injustice is being committed: against many bright products of independent schools who in recent years have been denied a place so that colleges can force their way up the table of state-school percentages. Many have gone instead to Durham, St Andrews, Bristol, Imperial and other excellent Russell Group universities. But many of these universities have also indicated that they would like to reduce their independent school intake.

The grounds for rejection of so many very capable students were in my view largely fabricated: the notion was that college admissions should concentrate not on “performance” such as past exam results, but “potential”, which would be identified in interview, in written work and in contextual evidence. This, though, is just a play with words. Dons had always considered potential and many, perhaps most, learned how to recognise students with minds of their own, who had not simply become A* performers of rote learning.

Today, however, it has become very easy for dons to dismiss accomplished products of Eton or St Paul’s as “well-taught”, shoving them into a category they did not deserve. Occasionally this has been the product of what can only be described as macro-aggression. I know of a tutor at another ancient university who quite simply refused to accept any applicants from independent schools. I do not believe that she was unique. The two schools I have already mentioned rightly wonder why their acceptance figures have dipped so steeply and rapidly. Behind the scenes, many colleges operate not targets but quotas.

Suggested reading

Plagiarism is not a sin

By Kathleen Stock

The background to all this is, nonetheless, change for the better. Half a century ago, entrance to Oxbridge was dominated by famous public schools which sent extremely bright people to both universities, but could also wangle places for those who were good on the river, so long as they achieved passable results in their exams. But this history is too often simplified and caricatured. The post-war period saw a wave of students from grammar schools, and in particular from the direct-grant schools, such as King Edward’s School in Birmingham, that occupied a middle ground between the fully independent sector and the state sector. Past statistics are now manipulated to ignore the valuable social role these schools played in providing places for children from all backgrounds, many on full scholarships. Later, after the abolition of the direct grant in 1976, the assisted places scheme brought many children into private schools their parents could not afford. The abolition of this excellent scheme was the very first act of Tony Blair’s government. And the current Labour Party has similar plans to seize upon independent schools as one of its very first acts by vengefully imposing VAT on school fees.

It goes without saying that parents, not their children, choose whether or not to send their sons and daughters to an independent school, assuming they can afford it, and many forego luxuries in order to do so. But many such private schools also operate upon a principle of academic selection, which is also how the most successful state schools achieve good results. Oxford and Cambridge draw some of its best and brightest from such schools as Queen Elizabeth’s in Barnet, predominantly middle-class Londoners who once upon a time might have been educated privately (and who instead pay the effective fees contained within local house prices, such is the competition for places). Perhaps, then, it should have come as less of a surprise that the late Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Stephen Toope, insisted that he wanted to make it “very, very clear” that selective grammar schools as well as independent schools deserve to win fewer places at Cambridge. More sensible is the view of his successor, Deborah Prentice, that Cambridge should draw more students from the north of England, since the south-east absolutely dominates undergraduate intake. That would represent genuine diversity.

Suggested reading

The university monopoly must be broken

By Julius Krein

Yet in the meantime, there are good reasons to worry about genuine injustices that arise when admissions tutors dig in their heels and refuse to accept excellent candidates from all types of selective school. I have heard too many stories of angry struggles between Fellows and admissions tutors over this, not to mention irritated complaints by long-suffering heads who have seen their top pupils turned down for places that they seemed certain to obtain. Some of these candidates may have wrecked their chances by a bad interview; but that cannot be the case each time. The suspicion of injustice is accentuated when a college accelerates its state-school intake within two or three years from around 56% to 72%. This can only be achieved, in my view, by a rigorous policy of positive discrimination and the mistaken admission of students who sometimes find themselves struggling with their work. In several colleges that used to be near the front of the tables of degree results tables this has been reflected in dreadful scores in once highly successful arts subjects. Meanwhile science dons remain very worried about the level of accomplishment of students whose schools seem to have taken a Lowest Common Denominator approach to education in science and mathematics, particularly in mixed-ability classes, teaching at a level that suits the weakest students.

The other side of the coin is that state schools that used to shun Oxbridge have become more enthusiastic about sending their pupils to either university, and the good news is that this has steadily increased numbers arriving from those schools. There was undoubtedly a barrier of prejudice, which turned on the myth that Oxford and Cambridge were themselves places that heave with social prejudice. We are often told by so-called modernisers that state school candidates are deterred by the supposedly arcane rituals of the ancient colleges. The sight in my own college of masses of enthusiastic male and female students from all backgrounds dining in Hall wearing their distinctive dark blue gowns, as well as the still overwhelmingly popular traditions of black-tie balls, gives the lie to that argument.

It has long been understood that, where two borderline candidates of equal merit are competing for the same place, it is generally right to take into account disadvantages that one might have experienced and to favour him or her. That seems to me to be acceptable, but the danger with the new proposals is that “contextual information” will be promoted to a dominant position, and we will end up with quotas masked as “targets” once again. Much depends on what this contextual information contains: private school pupils on scholarships and bursaries may come from low-income families; some may receive free school meals. There is an opportunity here to identify candidates who often fell into a crack in the past. But the ultimate test has to be the academic excellence of the candidate.

What I am saying should not, therefore, be regarded as an attempt to sing the virtues of independent schools but as an argument that all candidates deserve unprejudiced treatment, whatever their background and whatever type of school they attend. It is not the task of universities, especially those with the highest academic reputation, to solve problems lower down in the British system of education.

The reputation of Oxford and Cambridge depends on the outstanding quality of their teachers, researchers and, last but not least, its students. These leading universities are avowedly highly selective, and — if they want to remain among the top in the world — the criterion for selection, whether of students or lecturers and professors, must always be academic ability. The proposal to abandon the state-school target should be welcomed; but the danger remains that the pursuit of American-style Equity will do irreparable damage to Oxbridge and our other leading universities.

Well, no. Unless being an arch-traditionalist counts as a mental illness. It’s true that he had been through a gruelling process — prep school, private school — which has permanently broken others, but he was perfectly serene. Who wouldn’t be with a Cambridge fellowship, a private income and a maid and butler waiting for him at home?

I was sitting in his study one day when it started to get cold. “Let’s put the heater on, should we?” he said with an air of suppressed excitement. (He didn’t get out much.) There was a small heater at his feet, but instead of reaching down to flick the switch he rose, crossed the room, lifted a phone and summoned a college servant. A burly man in a neat white jacket entered after a moment or two, and went down on his knees as though in worship in front of the heater. My tutor thanked him courteously. He was not at all arrogant; indeed he was the very model of decency and civility. It’s just that he would no more have thought of switching on his own heater than he would have thought of extracting his own wisdom teeth. All this may look like trauma from the standpoint of South Carolina. I think we call it privilege over here.

This man’s problem was not that something appalling had happened to him, but that nothing had happened to him at all. The same can’t be said about one of his closest friends, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom my tutor wrote a rather stiff little memoir. In the course of the book he dismisses as “lurid” rumours that Wittgenstein was gay, though he was indeed gay and seemed to feel little guilt about it.

A lot more had happened to him than sleeping with other men, however. He was born into a patrician Viennese family in 1889, the son of the wealthiest industrialist in the Habsburg empire. Karl Wittgenstein was a fabulously rich steel magnate and high-class crook who rigged prices, bled his workers dry and did much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. The whole family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Three of Ludwig’s brothers committed suicide, including one whose first spoken word was “Oedipus”. (Sigmund Freud lived just round the corner.) Almost all of the children were prodigiously talented. The family home was like a conservatoire, with Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss dropping in for tea.

After designing a new kind of aircraft propeller at Manchester university, Ludwig became a student at Cambridge but detested academia and ran away to live by himself in a hut on a Norwegian fjord. Scarpering was one of his most habitual practices. He fought for the Austrian army in the First World War, and puzzled his superiors by asking to be assigned to more and more dangerous postings. In his rucksack he carried the manuscript of the only book he ever published, the snappily titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This work, he thought, solved all problems of philosophy, leaving one free to attend to what really mattered: ethics, music, religion and the like. When the book won him a Cambridge doctorate, one of his examiners drily remarked that it fulfilled the usual conditions of the degree apart from being a work of genius.

More from this author

Was Jesus a revolutionary?

By Terry Eagleton

After the war, Witter-Gitter (as some called him) inherited a slice of his father’s fortune and promptly gave it away to three of his siblings and various down-at-heel artists. “It’s better to go barefoot,” he remarked. He was austere, intense, imperious, intimidating and impossibly exacting. Though he wasn’t conventionally religious, he was afflicted by that strange mania known as Protestantism, for which one must attend to the slightest detail of one’s existence with unwavering seriousness. His college room contained almost nothing but a card table and a few deck chairs, very different from the Vienna of cream cakes, waltzes and ornate architecture which had produced him. He once said that he didn’t care what he ate as long as it was always the same. He was an accomplished architect and engineer who could design a house down to the last detail. He could also sculpt, play the clarinet superbly, conduct an orchestra and whistle whole symphonies. He is among the classic writers of German prose, and there are probably more works of art about him than about any other philosopher.

Wittgenstein did another runner after a while, this time to work as a village schoolmaster in the Austrian countryside. Driven out by the local people for clouting a child, he served as an assistant gardener in a monastery near Vienna before returning to Cambridge. During the Second World War he served as a porter at Guy’s hospital and worked in a medical laboratory in Newcastle. Then he ran away again, this time to Stalinist Russia, where he demanded to be trained as a physician and was packed off home in short order. He was known in Cambridge as a Communist fellow traveller, but his politics were more Tolstoyan than Marxist.

His final flight from the academic life, a few years before his death in 1951, was to the west of Ireland, where he lived by himself in a cottage, again on a fjord, and was reputed to be able to tame the birds. A young man called Tom Mulkerrins brought him his turf and helped about the house. I met Mulkerrins many years later, when I was writing the screenplay for Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, and listened aghast to his tale of burning piles of (no doubt priceless) manuscripts on his master’s orders. “I’m not the first to ask you about him, am I?” I inquired. “You’re neither the first nor the 41st,” he replied. Mary Robinson, who was President of Ireland at the time, unveiled a plaque to the eccentric foreigner at the cottage, and I gave a brief address to a small audience of Irish philosophers and Irish-speaking fishermen.

More from this author

Boris Johnson is no clown

By Terry Eagleton

Probably the finest English-speaking philosopher of the modern age, Wittgenstein didn’t think much of philosophy. In fact, he advised his disciples to give it up. One of the brightest of them did so and spent some years working in a factory, much to Wittgenstein’s approval. Instead of teaching from notes, he simply sat before his students and thought, writhing at times in what seemed like physical agony until an insight struggled its way out of his body.

He hadn’t read all that much philosophy himself, and seemed to prefer cowboy movies and detective stories. Philosophical problems, he believed, mostly sprang from certain duplicities of language, but these delusions were built so deeply into our grammar that to be free of them, we had to change our form of life. In this sense, his work is a long way from so-called linguistic philosophy, one of whose exponents claimed to have talked a student out of suicide by pointing out to him that the grammar of “nothing matters” differs from that of “nothing chatters”. Wittgenstein had good reason to believe that suicide went rather deeper than this. Indeed, he frequently contemplated it himself.

Despite his personal austerity, Wittgenstein’s later writing is full of jokes, anecdotes, enigmas, wonderings aloud, snatches of dialogue and homespun images. His Philosophical Investigations, put together by his colleagues after his death, compares the idea of a private language to a man passing money from one of his hands to the other and thinking he has made a financial transaction. Or alternatively, to someone who exclaims “But I know how tall I am!” and places his hand on top of his head. Is it true that I know that I’m in pain but can only guess that you are? Nonsense, Wittgenstein retorts. It makes no sense to say “I know I am in pain”, because the words “I know” have force only in a situation where you might not know, and not knowing you’re in pain isn’t possible.

Suggested reading

Sinn Féin won the demographic war

By Paul Morland

In this and other ways, Wittgenstein’s thought steadily undermines middle-class individualism. We are not isolated beings sealed within our own private, incommunicable experience. On the contrary, the way in which I come to know you is pretty much the way in which I come to know myself. How can I know that what I am feeling is jealousy unless I have been reared within a language which contains the concept? And language is nobody’s private property. Behind this distaste for the cult of the individual one can feel the disdain of aristocratic Vienna for the stout burgher.

Wittgenstein was an intriguing combination of monk, mystic and mechanic. He was a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a man who could never decide whether he was a Brahmin or an Untouchable. He turned away from what he called the pure ice of the intellect to the “rough ground” of everyday existence. However abstruse the problems we set ourselves, their roots are to be found in our routine practices. It is what we do, he comments, which lies at the bottom of our language-games. As one who hailed from an empire populated by Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Slovenes and a good many other quarrelsome ethnic groups, he came to see human culture as inherently diverse. The simple English phrase “it takes all kinds to make a world” struck his semi-outsider’s ears as “a very kindly and beautiful saying”.

Yet he was also an irascible autocrat with the haughtiness of his social class, as well as a man who lived for much of the time in spiritual torment. “Tell them it’s been a wonderful life,” he said on his deathbed, though quite in what sense is one of the many enigmas of his life and work. He was, he felt, a sinner in search of redemption, though he believed neither in sin nor redemption. My tutor had a wonderful life too, at least judging from the outside, but in one sense this was exactly his problem. To be a great artist or thinker you have to live, and decent chap though he was, he never quite got round to doing much of that.

– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.
– She must really cook well by now!
– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress so far…

Maybe it’s not so much funny as telling; but what it is telling of is the hijacking of a non-political activity — cookery, but it may as well be biology or history or maths — for a political end.

That end was not (or not only) to stuff your mind with state-approved facts (“facts”); it was to fashion a new man. Enthusiastic about “progressive” causes, responsive to peer pressure and ready to join in exerting it, and completely self-righteous, Homo Sovieticus would be the raw material of the Marxist New Jerusalem. As Stalin put it when toasting tame writers: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

Communism has passed away. But the production of souls, or rather their engineering, survives in the capitalist Anglosphere. In our Higher Education sector it doesn’t just survive — it thrives, in the form of political indoctrination passed off as “training” or “mission statements”, specifically on the Thirty-nine Articles de nos jours: racism, unconscious bias, transphobia and the rest of it.

St Andrew’s, for instance, insists that students pass a “diversity” module in order to matriculate. Questions include: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias. Do you agree or disagree?” The only permitted answer is “agree”. But what if you don’t feel, and don’t want to accept, personal guilt for anything? What if you think (like Nietzsche) that guilt itself is counterproductive? As one student aptly commented, “Such issues are never binary and the time would be better spent discussing the issue, rather than taking a test on it.”

My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.

It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.

It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end. For instance, Sussex says: “[a]s an institution we must actively play our part in dismantling the systems and structures that lead to racial inequality, disadvantage and under-representation”. Bristol expects all its members to “stand up” to racism “wherever it occurs”.

Suggested reading

How our universities became sheep factories

By George Smith

And on modern definitions, it may occur more often than its perpetrators or victims have ever noticed. For a thoroughly representative example: one Cambridge department tells students that expressions of racism include “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions that end up reproducing and re-establishing a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups”. Notice that this definition is effectively suppressing beliefs (not just behaviour) on the vague and possibly intangible basis of whether they “reproduce a system”.

Now imagine being a clever, white 18-year old, not at all racist and not at all privileged either, away from home for the first time, in a lecture or class in (say) sociology, or politics, or philosophy, where a lecturer asserts, perhaps quite aggressively, that white people are inherently racist. Your own experience screams that this is wrong. But do you challenge it? Of course not – after all, it may have, and could certainly be presented as having, the effect of “marginalising minority groups”; and your own institution has told you, through formal training and via its website, that this is racism and we must all stand up to it.

So you keep quiet. So does everyone else; and the lie spreads. Repeat for white privilege, or immigration, or religion; perhaps also, given similar training and encouragement, for abortion, or the trans debate, or… Repeat for a thousand students a day, every day, for the whole term.

There is in Shia Islam the most useful concept of Ketman. It is the practice of concealing or denying your true beliefs in the face of religious persecution. At best our hypothetical student spends her university career – possibly, the way things are going, the rest of her life – practising a secular form of Ketman. Or worse: habitual self-censorship of her outer voice suffocates the inner one too; she starts to believe what she is parroting; she denounces others as racists, or transphobes or whatever; and then after three or four years, starts working for a publisher, or a media outlet, or a big corporation; and the euthanasia of the West continues.

Suggested reading

Cancel Culture has captured campus

By Eric Kaufmann

I should say that anti-racist training or rhetoric does not only appeal to the ideologues who appear to welcome that process. There are other motives, of which at least one is quite understandable. Genuine racism and racial discrimination do exist – there is less now than 30 years ago, but you still notice it. You notice or hear about slurs, pointed comments, racist graffiti or physical violence; you notice being overlooked.

I remember looking for a room to rent when I first started working in London. All my white friends had found one pretty quickly. But for some reason, whenever I showed up to see one it had “just been taken”. I’ll never know how much of this was racism in my own case; but I do hear, and I have no reason to doubt, that similar things happen today.

But bringing in diversity training because racism still exists is like prescribing leeches because people still get headaches. As hundreds of studies attest, it just doesn’t work. It may even exacerbate existing prejudice. Making this training compulsory is especially likely to be counterproductive. A 2016 study of more than 800 US firms finds that:

five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance-and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

Paying for something with no proven benefits is bad enough. Compulsory training may actively be making things worse.

Another motive, equally understandable but less laudable, is corporate self-interest. I remember arguing at length about training with a well-intentioned senior functionary at a Russell Group university who finally “justified” it on the grounds that “At least we’re doing something”. Doing something, at least seeming to do something, is a familiar practice: oil companies that ostentatiously invest in renewable energy, or tobacco companies that publicly support health research. Since summer 2020, what has especially moved the highly-paid bureaucrats running higher education is the need to look as if you care about racism. Hence, perhaps, all the expensive and useless training; hence the solemn statements about George Floyd and police violence; hence the rhetoric of the “anti-racist” (not just not racist, but anti-racist) university.

Suggested reading

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

One obvious problem of corporate whitewashing is the unevenness with which it is applied. Racism is bad, but so is much else. And yet our soi-disant “anti-racist” universities rarely if ever call themselves “anti-genocide” or “anti-corruption” or “anti-censorship” or (for that matter) “anti-corporate-bullshit”. In summer 2020, you could hardly move for universities making fatuous assertions of “solidarity” with victims of racism. But you won’t find similarly prominent (and probably not any) support, from the same sources, for free speech in Hong Kong or for the non-extermination of the Uyghurs. But then upsetting China might affect your bottom line.

This isn’t empty whataboutery. Making corporate statements on racism, and not on these other things, means implicitly ranking anti-racism as the more pressing cause. Confiscating their time and attention for anti-racism training means imposing the same judgment on its staff and students; in effect, doing our thinking for us. Thanks for the offer, but I think we can manage for ourselves.

Whatever the source of demand for training, supply has rushed in to meet it. The winners are (a) the university leaders who can loudly proclaim their woke credentials and (b) the diversity-industrial complex whose clients they are. The immediate losers are the staff and students who expected, and deserved, to give or get education not indoctrination; but in time the losers will be all of us.

It isn’t too late, though. The obvious solution is the immediate and permanent scrapping of any kind of politically or ideologically oriented training or induction. It has no place in a university.

Then, enforce explicit institutional neutrality. In February 1967, the President of Chicago University appointed law professor Harry Kalven Jr to chair a committee tasked with preparing a “statement on the University’s role in political and social action”. The upshot was the Kalven Report, which stated in the clearest possible terms both the essential function of the University and the essential requirement for political neutrality that followed:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society… A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community… It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy.

These words should be installed in 10-foot high neon in the office of every Vice-Chancellor in the country. And their universities should commit, publicly and non-negotiably, never to take a corporate stance, in any direction, on any political or social question.

The Higher Education Bill currently going through Parliament imposes a new duty on universities to promote the importance of free speech. Clarifying what this means will be the job of guidance to be issued by the Office for Students. That guidance should recommend both the scrapping of political training and the adoption of institutional neutrality. Doing that and then enforcing it would clearly signal, what I very much hope is true, that the regulator sees the difference between properly run universities and the sheep-factories that they are on the way to becoming.

Williams was born in the Monmouthshire village of Pandy, north of Abergavenny,  a hundred years ago tomorrow, 31 August 1921. Widely revered at his death (aged just 66) as a leader of radical thought and a pioneer of cultural studies in the education system, he later suffered a partial, but never total, eclipse. Moulded as he was by the seismic, class-driven upheavals of the mid-20th century, Williams adjusted clumsily to the “new social movements” of the Eighties.

Feminism, for instance, hardly features in his best-known work. Fathers and sons dominate his fiction. He tends to speak from, and for, the postwar generations of “upwardly mobile” (a phrase he would have detested) boys left emotionally orphaned amid the chilly, opaque institutions of England. As his 1960 novel, Border Country, laments, “We have, you might say, a personal father but no social father.” A pattern of discipleship, rupture and reconciliation marked his bonds with younger, male devotees. For this, as times and attitudes changed, he paid a posthumous price in waning fame and clout. Terry Eagleton – first a devoted student, briefly a parricidal rebel, then a fervent admirer once again – reports in a centenary tribute that when he offered a piece on Williams to The Guardian not long ago, “the highly literate young journalist on the other end of the phone said ‘Er – remind me’”.

OK: let’s do that. A railway signalman (and market gardener’s) son, Williams won state scholarships and went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939. He joined, but soon left, the Communist Party, served as a tank officer in the Guards Armoured Division after D-Day, helped liberate a concentration camp, returned to finish his degree in English, then spent 15 years as an adult-education tutor on the South Coast. After Culture and Society appeared in 1958, and The Long Revolution in 1961, Cambridge appointed him to a lectureship (contrary to myth, they did ask him first). Later literary studies – on drama, the title of his eventual Cambridge professorship, and the English novel – alternated with works that mainstreamed the study of media, gave a cutting social edge to historical linguistics, and sought to elaborate a non-sectarian radical politics, Left of Labour. Meanwhile, three key novels — Border Country, Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979) — showed how history’s transformations feel in the pulse and flow of individual lives. He retired from teaching in 1983, pivoted back to Wales (though living most of the time in Essex), and dipped his pen in a deeper shade of eco-green.

Suggested reading

Philip Roth's carnival of desire

By Boyd Tonkin

Williams mapped the changing landscapes of class, culture and democracy in Britain with both panoramic, and microscopic, skill and care. Books such as Culture and Society, The Country and the City, Television: Technology and Cultural Form and his historical lexicon of Keywords became teaching staples in many lands. From Argentina via Spain to India, and around the British Isles, conferences and lectures will remind audiences of why Williams matters over the coming weeks. The problem, as their subject knew only too well, is that (save, perhaps, in Wales) these memorial rituals will preach mainly to the choir. As a working-class kid transported, but never alienated, by an elite schooling, Williams both serviced the postwar boom in higher education and the “culture industries”, and lamented its long-term results. Radical dissent marched en masse into the institutions, but those institutions — above all, universities – packaged it into a suite of careerist codes and tricks designed to repel civilians.

For decades he pursued the elusive unicorn of a “common culture” beyond the manipulated splits of consumer-capitalist society (the ideal is sketched in his groundbreaking Culture and Society). He wanted his voice to carry into communities far beyond the common room – or the newsroom. He also cherished a self-image as a writer, not just a critic or theorist. Hence the quixotic farewell fresco of the Black Mountains stories: two volumes appeared after his death. As epic blockbusters, they only sporadically work (in his wise, affectionate but caustic critical biography of Williams, Fred Inglis shakes his head over “characters with names like detergents or computer grammars”). But the sagas’ aeon-spanning sweep and vision does have a craggy awesomeness. These people from the ragged edge of history become the heroic bearers of deep time and epochal change. In the much more successful Border Country, Williams has a clergyman tell his protagonist that “a life lasts longer than the actual body though which it moves”. That goes, supremely, for the author as well.

Suggested reading

Nero wasn't 'misunderstood'

By Boyd Tonkin

Williams always taught students and readers to look beyond the flame and froth of transient events and recognise the giant shapes of class, power and history behind them. To this day I find that a dose of his perspective is enough to bestow a degree of serenity about who’s being slaughtered, or sanctified, on social media this week, as the puppet-slaves of Silicon Valley billionaires perform unpaid pirouettes of outrage for extra clicks. Whenever I hear about “culture wars”, I reach mentally for Williams. “Whose culture?”, he would ask, and who declared that war? Who decided to re-frame normal, even profound, democratic disagreements about policy and politics as trump cards of personal identity? Whose interests does that serve? And why should reasoning citizens who want to live well with their neighbours, near and far, sign up for the psychic suicide missions this “war” demands?

Williams, in my view, ceded too much ground to the salon theorists who tried to outflank him from the Left as they sneered at his “socialist humanism” in the canting jargon of the Seventies and Eighties. Indeed, he sat down for weeks to be grilled by the junior Robespierres of New Left Review in the book-length conversations of Politics and Letters (1979). About a work such as the indigestible Marxism and Literature (1977), you have to sigh that — in the deepest sense — his heart wasn’t in it. But his early challenges both to mind-bending commercial media (purely capitalist, not “mass”) and to the ruling-class capture of “high” culture as the cloak of privilege have kept all their moral, and political, bite. “We lack a genuinely common experience,” he thundered in Culture and Society, “save in certain rare and dangerous moments of crisis.” Say that again, in pandemic times. “What we are paying for this lack, in every kind of currency, is now sufficiently evident. We need a common culture, not for the sake of an abstraction, but because we shall not survive without it.” Well, we might survive, huddled in our tribal silos and daily maddened by twittering rage. But will we thrive?

Suggested reading

What modern feminism is hiding

By Mary Harrington

The paradox, as many followers attest, is that this apostle of long views and deep structures won his renown thanks to a strictly personal authority. That owed everything to character, and nothing to the abstract forces of cultural theory. Once Terry Eagleton had got over his Marxier-than-thou phase, he saluted his teacher’s “deep inward ease of being, the sense of a man somehow centred and rooted and secure in himself at a level far beyond simple egoism”. What strikes me as remarkable about Williams’s twin descents on Cambridge — as a working-class teenager laden with grammar-school plaudits in 1939, and a star extra-mural tutor summoned to High Table in 1961 — is not any sense of marginality, but the serene confidence he carried with him at both stages.

I can recall him dismissing George Steiner’s argument that the lowly human ants of modern society could never attain truly tragic status, so what did it matter if you or I were run down by a bus tomorrow? “Speak for yourself” came the riposte. Exactly. Kindly, but granitic and reserved, he seemed as solid as the bulk of Ysgyryd Fawr looming above Pandy. At a time before folk on the Left found themselves vilified as “nowhere” people whose flighty cosmopolitanism humiliated rooted “somewheres”, here was a thoroughly radical writer-thinker who not only came from somewhere very specific — indeed, peculiar — but built his sense of being around it.

The mountain-shadowed village communities of the Welsh borders gave Williams his lifelong template for an authentic existence planted in shared values. Nowhere in his writing does this heartland glow in such a golden light as in the highly autobiographical Border Country. It still serves, for non-academic readers, as the best first stop on a journey through his work. “The real life, for these people, is each other,” says the lonely Anglican priest to Border Country’s hero Matthew Price, who later returns home – as Williams did – for his father Harry’s final days.

Yet Williams, like his left-wing peers, could never quite devise the formula to scale up the blend of solidarity and individuality he cherished in Pandy onto a larger social map. Hence the sad aridity of his efforts to model a practical politics of national, and supra-national, renewal when he had achieved his guru status by the Seventies. His big-picture blueprints and manifestoes lay stillborn on the page. The signal-box and smallholding still cast their semi-pastoral spell. Yes, he always warned against nostalgia – The Country and the City sounds its withering blast against golden-age fantasies in poetry and society alike – but the lost idyll of those hazy borderlands pulls him back as much as forward. As Fred Inglis shrewdly put it, Williams’s “version of socialism” stumbled when it tried, and failed, to turn “losers’ values into winners’ values”. So have many others since.

Pandy made for an odd sort of Utopia, and hardly a standard working-class childhood. Harry Williams, Raymond’s father, not only sharpened his political awareness with comrades in the Great Western signal-boxes up and down the line. He kept bees and grew vegetables as a serious sideline. Green strands mingled with the red in this paradisal place (but not an “organic community” – another fraudulent notion Williams liked to attack). Half-proletarians, half-peasants, these railway children enjoyed a large degree of self-sufficient freedom.

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

In Border Country, the General Strike of 1926 ends in the failure that exposes the fragility of their way of life and ushers in “a slow and shocking cancellation of the future”. Harry Price’s comrade Morgan Rosser sticks with his Labour ideals but starts to market local produce to the towns. He becomes “a kind of capitalist”. The novel does not condemn him. Matthew follows his creator’s path through scholarships into middle-class academia (though as an economic historian). “You’re asking what change does to people, change from outside them, the big movements,” Morgan says when he and Matthew meet for Harry’s leave-taking. In fiction and criticism, Williams never ceased to ask that question himself. Always, he shows us how to connect inside and outside, experience and history. The “structures of feeling” that shape minds and communities shift slowly: not like inert strata of rock under the hills but in response to the public action that, if we don’t undertake it, those with more money and fewer scruples will.

Perhaps Williams never found the means to make the levers of power work in a fully human way not just at signal-box level but for the metropolitan — and multi-national — junctions where most of us now live. As for so many others, it enriched my understanding hugely that he tried. “I can’t just come back, as if the change was water,” says Matthew to his dying father in Border Country. The change, rather, is history. Neither could anyone revive the special configurations of class, culture and education that made Williams not just an agenda-setter but a bestseller five decades ago. Our social geology has shifted, and our “structures of feeling” with it. Who can map those mountains now?

Boyd Tonkin was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature

There was, however, a small glint on the horizon: a fleet of 31 privately chartered passenger jets that were scheduled to land, regardless of the new restrictions. Their cargo? Some 7,000 students from China — all specially flown in to study at universities in Manchester and the north of England.

After they landed, a handful of Manchester’s leading dignatories lined up to talk about the importance of “links between Britain and China” and “greater cultural understanding”. The socially distanced love-in was cemented by none other than the Chinese Consul General in Manchester, Mr Zheng Xiyuan: “We trust all students will work hard to become not just the backbone of our society but also messengers of friendship between our two peoples.”

Of course, no one would surely deny that it is important to maintain cordial relations with one of the world’s superpowers. But, as those planes touched down on the runway, there was no getting away from the cold reality — even in this time of crisis, even with all scheduled direct flights between China and Manchester cancelled at the time, Britain’s university sector simply could not do without Beijing’s moneybags. And the implications of this extend well beyond the beleaguered souls and balance sheets in the finance departments of our universities. In fact, as other countries across the world are starting to discover, we are not just offering China the chance for a British education; but quite possibly the keys to our nation’s security as well.

Suggested reading

Don't mess with China's feminists

By Qi Chen

In the UK alone, Chinese students account for almost £2 billion in revenue for the higher education sector. Crucially, nine British universities — many of them members of the Russell Group — depend on Chinese students for more than 20% of their revenue from tuition fees. Take Imperial College London, which gets more than 20% of its tuition fees from China. Without these students, it would face a £73 million black hole; all at a time when its research projects — which include a Covid-19 vaccine trial aimed at targeting the new mutant strains of the virus — could not be more crucial.

But this link between Britain’s universities and the Chinese state is hardly a new phenomenon. For years they have made for an inseparable couple, one whose relationship has longed looked, at the very best, questionable; at worst, potentially criminal.

“I think it’s probably going too far to suggest that we have become a client state of the Chinese,” Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute tells me. “But we have certainly been putting too many eggs in the Chinese basket. Inevitably having such dependent relationships with a country such as China — or Saudi Arabia even — is going to bring with it political challenges.”

In light of recent events, however, Mr Hillman’s use of the term “political challenges” seems worthy of a PhD in understatement. Indeed, such is our desperation for foreign investment that one particularly apposite Chinese proverb seems almost too prescient: “In every crisis, you will find an opportunity.” The Chinese state is certainly testing that maxim to its very limit.

Only yesterday it was revealed that Oxford University has agreed to re-name its Wykeham Chair of Physics as the Tencent-Wykeham Professorship — after Tencent, a Chinese software firm with links to the Communist regime’s intelligence services, offered a £700,000 donation in return. Meanwhile, on Monday it emerged that almost 200 British academics are being investigated by HMRC on suspicion of helping the Chinese Government build weapons of mass destruction. They have not been accused of spying per se, but unwittingly passing intellectual property to the Chinese authorities and thus violating strict laws on exports.

The British government is yet to send enforcement notices to the staff, who teach at more than dozen universities. Yet its warning certainly lends a sense of urgency to a report, published by Civitas this week, which alleges that 20 British universities have dealings with 29 Chinese institutions, as well as nine companies that have military links, including weapons conglomerates. It warned that UK research sponsored by Chinese organisations could have an “inadvertent dual use” in a military capacity — including hypersonic technology and research into Graphene which is used by the Chinese military in helicopters.

Suggested reading

China's plan for medical domination

By Steve Boggan

Yet Britain’s universities seem more concerned with the economic fall-out from than pandemic than with any unseemly political or security repercussions. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when, for example, Manchester University has more Chinese students — they make up roughly one in eight of its student body — than any other university in Europe. That may explain why, when the pandemic first hit last year, Britain’s higher education sector was struck by a sense of impending doom. One minister reportedly said last summer that officials were “shitting themselves” at the prospect of a Chinese brain drain.

All of which raises an obvious question: how has Britain got itself into this mess? After all, there is nothing new about the Government’s security concerns over Beijing inveigling its way into our higher education sector. Even two years ago, the academic world was warned that “hostile state actors are targeting UK universities to steal personal data, research data and intellectual property, and this could be used for their own military, commercial and authoritarian interests.” University staff were also told that they “may also be targeted by an academic institution to undertake research which is of strategic benefit to that country”.

In fact, GCHQ had by 2019 already counted 500 Chinese military scientists attached to British universities who were working on technology platforms with a number of military applications, including missiles, supercomputers and fighter aircraft. And it’s all too easy to see how this research could end up being used as part of Beijing’s ever-expanding toolbox of state repression. Only last week, Manchester University was forced to cancel a contract with a Chinese company after it was warned that the software it supplied was being used by Beijing in its mass surveillance of Uighur Muslims.

Nor is that an anomaly. As recently as last summer, some UK universities were testing a new online teaching link which could prevent students based in China from remotely accessing material deemed unfavourable to or critical of the Communist regime. Moreover, a recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the infiltration of our universities by China lists, among others: Cambridge University’s links with a Chinese military institution already blacklisted by the US Government; a recruitment drive by Imperial College at the Harbin Institute of Technology, whose scientists work for the PLA and which is one of only eight Chinese universities with access to classified weapons research; and a laboratory funded jointly by Manchester University and a Chinese developer of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Suggested reading

How China could turn off Britain's lights

By Clive Hamilton

For their part, the universities insist that due care and diligence is in place. In the wake of the ASPI report, Manchester University put out a back-covering statement: “We take all necessary measures to assure ourselves that our research is not used beyond its agreed application.” But whatever steps are being taken — both by universities and the security services — it may be too late.

Last year, a report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 900 graduates of Chinese universities allegedly linked to the PLA were enrolled in postgraduate studies at 33 British universities. And while we are yet to experience the full repercussions of such folly, we need only look across the Atlantic to see what could be in store for us.

Just a few weeks ago, the US attorney’s office announced the arrest of Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for “failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards from various entities in the People’s Republic of China to the US Department of Energy.” It came just a day after Meyya Meyyappan, NASA’s Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology, pled guilty in New York for lying about his participation in a Chinese government recruitment program.

But not all such American investigations have proved so fruitful. Last year, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Boston University student Yanqing Ye, who was unmasked as a lieutenant in the PLA. She was charged with being an agent of a foreign government, accessing US military websites and sending classified material back to China — but is now believed to have fled back to her home country.

In Britain, meanwhile, we continue to turn a blind eye to such threats. No doubt this is an inevitable consequence of the unseemly lengths our universities go to in order to secure funding from China. But it’s worth noting that Britain’s begging bowl has been in place for some time, and not just in the higher education sector. Indeed, it seems not so long ago that David Cameron spoke so enthusiastically about the “golden era” of Sino-UK relations.

This new relationship was sealed by Cameron and President Xi Jinping over a pint at the Plough, a pub near Chequers which, like all drinking spots in Britain, it is now firmly locked down. Locals, however, have every confidence that it will have the wherewithal to open again when the pandemic restrictions are finally lifted. The reason? The Plough was bought up by Chinese investors almost as soon the Supreme Leader downed his pint.

Of course there was an air of flagrant hypocrisy about such a speech code, since the university was hardly respectful to the views of Noah Carl and Jordan Peterson. So one doesn’t have to be a huge cynic or pessimist to fear that a “respect” clause might, therefore, be used in a highly political or one-sided manner. “Respect” is easily-demanded but begrudgingly given, especially by those who feel they are occupying the moral high ground; and as one of the academics who objected to the proposals, Arif Ahmed, explained to UnHerd, “respect” is also a very weak basis on which to build free speech.

Must a scientist, or anyone else at Cambridge for that matter, “respect” a flat-earther? Or someone who believes it is turtles all the way down? Lost though much of academia is in over-specialisation or specialisation in non-specialisms, this instruction could only further the university’s troubles, creating the situation where absolutely everyone feels entitled to “respect”.

As Prof Ahmed and others suggested, a much better guideline is that “staff, students and visitors” at Cambridge should “be tolerant of the differing opinions of others”. And so on Wednesday this amendment was voted upon and passed with an overwhelming majority.

This was presented as a great win in the free-speech battles both on campuses and in wider society — and of course in some ways it obviously is. But it is also a sharp lesson in how the “diversity, inclusion and equalities” agenda never sleeps, and every small victory is just a momentary skirmish in an endless battle to stop further encroachment.

Because only a day after the vote went against the university council, all employees in the School of Arts and Humanities at Cambridge were treated to an email informing them that their university is “committed to ensuring an inclusive culture of mutual respect and tolerance”. And as with all such statements, the very blandness of the language masks the relentless advancement of a political agenda that is the opposite of tolerance.

One of the first rules of logic I was taught — by a Cambridge-trained philosopher, as it happens — is that you should never utter a sentence the opposite of which would only be uttered by a madman.

Alas the people who now instruct Cambridge’s academics in how to think do not have the rigour of previous generations. It is hard to imagine a sane person instructing an academic body of distinctly intelligent people that their university is “committed to ensuring a hostile culture of mutual antipathy and intolerance”. There may have been certain colleges at certain points where that appeared to be the aim, but nobody would ever state it as such. So why say — why bother even to type out — this verbiage about respect and tolerance? Why waste the time of intelligent people with such drivel?

The answer is that of course the drivel is part of the guiding theology of the time. Just as the university ethos might once have lingered over transubstantiation or the nature of the Trinity, so in our time ancient foundations such as Cambridge have dedicated themselves to belief in these wide and shallow concepts, rolled out by people who are shallow in turn. They are enforced by people who imagine that what they are saying is not just profound, but necessary, and who construct their dogmas in order to try to make them impossible to oppose.

More from this author

Should our footballers be down on their knees?

By Douglas Murray

And of course they now have whole armies of bureacrats on their side. People whose sole job — generally remunerated at a level noticeably higher than that of an academic setting off on their career — is to enforce the “diversity and inclusion” agenda. The high priests of this faith may have the odd setback in their battles (such as Wednesday’s vote) but they will not be diverted from their mission for long. For their souls depend on it. Their salaries depend on it. Their pensions depend on it. And they presumably feel some sense of moral distinction from enforcing these edicts.

The email sent to faculty after Wednesday’s vote waffled on about the need to “treat each other with respect, courtesy and consideration” informing them that their employer is “in the process of setting up an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) forum” which would “take forward work in this area” (as opposed to taking work in this area backwards, which would actually — on this occasion — be the recommendation of a sane man).

More from this author

The world needs Jordan Peterson more than ever

By Douglas Murray

The Cambridge academics are also told that all staff must “undertake the following Equality and Diversity Training” which includes “Equality and Diversity Essentials” and “Understanding implicit bias”. The university has also apparently agreed that all staff should attend sessions on “Race awareness” and “Respect at work”.

Professor Chris Young, whose signature shamefully signs off this letter, tells his colleagues that “the School would like to see all staff attend these training sessions wherever possible by the end of 2021 and statistics on uptake of the training will be monitored via the School Council”. And if that is not a covert threat from an employer to their employees, it is hard to see what is.

Similar training courses have sprung up at universities across the country, without discussion or consulation, with even well-established academics cowed into attending for fear of damaging their careers. It doesn’t matter how irrelevant their subject should be to the religion of anti-racism — for the new ideology, nothing is outside politics. Many academics are privately very unhappy about the state of affairs, but of course they keep quiet; no one would “respect” their views if they objected.

And thus Cambridge’s best will be subjected to sessions such as “Race Awareness: Whiteness and being a White Anti-Racist Ally”. During this two-part seminar one Dr Joanna Jasiewicz will help Cambridge academics develop “practical tools to become a white ally” and provide “an opportunity for us to speak about race and challenging racism”.

I wonder what conclusions these sessions will come to? Or what presumptions it might make in advance? The fact that implicit bias training has long been comprehensively debunked is apparently not so serious a problem that it should deter Cambridge University from forcing all of its faculty members to undergo it.

Suggested reading

How racist are you?

By Tom Chivers

But this is the problem with the whole “equalities” system of belief. It is an agenda that never sleeps because it involves an industry paid to stay awake. And not just to stay awake, but to advance. It may lose the odd battle, and be exposed in the odd national publication. Its foundations may be shown to be shallow and its conclusions demonstrated to be false. Yet on it will march, through the faculties and over the schools, around the traditions of an ancient institution and beneath the dignity of the people it forces to submit to it.

Its opponents may be encouraged by the small victories along the way, but in doing so they risk forgetting that every victory on these terms is not a victory — it is merely the slowing down of the advance of this misguided ideology.

Cambridge University’s response to the vote this week is a fine demonstration of this. Yes. the ideology suffered a setback, when faced with an actual vote. But onwards it intends to march, and however wrong it proves still it intends to take its “work in this area” forward, not backwards, to a future of greater stupidity and mental sloppiness. It cannot stop, and it never will — unless it is made to.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the University Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, proposed the new speech code; it was the governing council.

So if two people have precisely the same qualifications and fitness for a role, but one of them has a racial or sexual difference and is either advanced or held back because of it, you could legitimately say that the subjects had been treated unequally.

Even in a country as tolerant and open as Britain, it is undeniable that historically people have been disadvantaged because of their sex, sexuality or skin colour. Roles for which they have been eminently fit and suited have been closed to them because of a characteristic over which they have no say. Not all the bad blood from this has gone away.

Of course the way to dissipate any remaining bad blood would be to visibly and consistently strive to appoint people to positions based on their merit, confident that in the course of time people of ability will rise to the positions which they deserve. But what would be the most divisive way in which to go about trying to address such inequalities? Well, that would be to very visibly and obviously create and institute a mirror version of the old system: to attempt to carve out special privileges for people who look like those who suffered discrimination in the past, and to treat with a special disdain and contempt the people who look like they might have once benefited from discrimination.

There have been a number of fine examples of this emerging catastrophe in recent days. There has, for instance, been the exceptionally light-touch policing which allowed early Black Lives Matter protests to descend into violence and disorder in London. And the very heavy-handed policing (justified, as it happens, but which could have been used at the previous protests) when groups of predominantly white and often violent protestors turned up to ‘defend’ statues which were under attack from some BLM protestors.

Suggested reading

Who dares resist the Thought Police?

By Paul Embery

Then there was the sacking of the 24-year old who arranged the “White Lives Matter Burnley” stunt, after a month of hearing politicians, media, corporations and street protestors repeatedly citing the slogan of BLM.

Of course, you might for a time say that ‘Black Lives Matter’ should be a promotional matter and ‘White Lives Matter’ a sackable one. But it begs the question of how long you want to keep that standard up for? A month? A year? Indefinitely? If indefinitely isn’t achievable we get back to that issue I have raised here before, which is how you would know when you have ‘over-corrected’ for long enough.

The question hovers over institution after institution, even at places that used to be our major seats of learning.

Most people in the UK will never have heard of Priyamvada Gopal. A scholar of ‘post-colonial studies’, she holds a fellowship at Cambridge University and lectures in the English faculty there, despite not being especially distinguished even in her own field. A small body of work sits behind her — but a greater body of grievance clearly sits within her. Two years ago she made headlines after berating the college porters at Kings College, Cambridge, accusing them of calling her “Madam” instead of “Dr Gopal”. And this act of “racism” caused Dr Gopal to not only berate the lower-order porters, but to threaten to withhold her talents from the inhabitants of King’s.

That mixture of haughtiness and incendiarism appears to be Gopal’s preferred register. On Twitter she regularly produces content which is so unbecoming of an academic at any institutions — let alone at our second-greatest university — that I confess that for a while, after first coming across her, I assumed that she was a spoof. Surely nobody who acts in such a deranged and deliberately provocative manner could possibly have any role at an institution of higher learning?

More from this author

Why J.K. Rowling had to be denounced

By Douglas Murray

But she does, and this week Cambridge reaped their latest reward from her presence. On Wednesday Gopal chose to send out a message on Twitter saying:

“I’ll say it again. White Lives
Don’t matter.
As white lives.”

Quite how this racist little rant adds to the store of Cambridge University’s reputation in the world would be a matter for that university’s authorities. If it had any. As though to prove that her intentions were honourable and sane, Gopal followed this up with a Tweet simply saying, “Abolish whiteness”.

Which is of course totally normal behaviour, and definitely the way that academics at publicly-funded institutions are meant to pass their time. But what was most interesting on this occasion was once again not the ugly and divisive rhetoric of one undistinguished academic, but rather the reaction of the University’s authorities.

Amazingly enough, Gopal’s statement that the lives of white people do not matter did not land with universal acclaim. Surprisingly — which must have come as a great grief to her — some members of the public objected to her use of her platform and time to spread racism. Some complained to the university. And on Wednesday evening Cambridge University issued its own statement:

The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks. These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease.

— Cambridge University (@Cambridge_Uni) June 24, 2020

Of course that statement is a flat-out lie. Cambridge has been deeply unwilling to stand by its academics in recent years. Last year the University dismissed the young researcher Noah Carl after a mob that was totally ignorant of Carl’s areas of research decided that he was guilty of racism. A most cursory investigation was performed, and then they revoked the contract they had already given him.

Also in the past year came the case of Jordan Peterson. The Canadian academic and professor was meant to take up a visiting position at Cambridge University, only for the institition to rescind their offer after it was brought to their attention that one fan at a meet-and-greet had once had his picture taken beside Dr Peterson while wearing a t-shirt saying “I’m a proud Islamophobe”.

Both Peterson and Carl are white men. Both were dismissed by Cambridge University for racism ‘adjacency’ (to use one of the weasel words of the time). Neither was remotely guilty of the charge of racism because neither man is a racist. But I suspect that if either of them had ever tweeted out a statement saying, “Black lives don’t matter”, or “Indian lives don’t matter” or similar racist garbage, then I strongly suspect that Cambridge University would have dismissed them even more swiftly than they did. If that were possible.

Suggested reading

Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

So what is the difference? The only variable that explains Cambridge’s prejudicial standards is that Gopal is not white. Cambridge University has carved out a racism-allowance for Gopal where she can act in a manner in which others would not. She is literally priviliged.

And it is not just an allowance, but a positive ladder. After her Twitter rant, Gopal started to point to abusive messages which her racist tweets had garnered and pointed to these as evidence that she must be right — a renowned cry-bully move. But on Thursday she announced how well this had all worked for her, because the evening before “Cambridge promoted me to a full Professorship”. Was there some sudden surge in quality in Gopal’s work? A sudden swell of academic material which suddenly opened the University’s eyes to the gem that was sitting in their midsts? Clearly not.

Like all really successful 21^st-century privilege-wielders, Gopal knows how to play the game. You pretend that you are in a position of weakness and vulnerability, when you are actually in a position of power. You present yourself as a victim as soon as people call you out as an aggressor. And you pretend to be the offended party after going out of your way to cause maximum offence yourself.

I don’t know how long these new racist standards will be allowed to run. Perhaps longer than they did before. But what should be clear by now is that anything less likely to foster harmony or tolerance than these current inverted standards could hardly be imagined.

Right now, if academics dare to challenge orthodoxy in the hot-button areas of race, sexuality and gender, their job may be on the line. But each time opponents of reason and free enquiry win, our society loses a little more of its hard-won liberty. That’s why I applaud the young researcher, Noah Carl, and have donated to his campaign to raise the legal funds needed to challenge his wrongful dismissal by St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. 

More from this author

How the woke inquisition broke Cambridge

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah won his place at the university rightfully, in an extremely competitive process. But he didn’t reckon on the influence of the ‘social justice’ Left. They wield extraordinary power as they mobilise flash mobs and perform on camera to win plaudits from their international, social media, ‘social justice’ subculture. They targeted Noah and his so-called ‘racist pseudoscience’ and mustered 1500 to sign a letter calling for his dismissal. Cambridge bowed to their demands.

These activists, and people like them, justify themselves and their actions with a worldview constructed from two conceptual sleights-of-hand.

The first involves expanding the remit of words – what psychologist Nick Haslam terms ‘concept creep‘ or political scientist Giovanni Sartori would call ‘conceptual stretching’. The meaning of ‘harm’ is extended to encompass the psychological ‘harm’ of hearing uncomfortable ideas. Often the harm that such ideas pose may not be clear to their supposed victims, so activists must work hard to frame these ideas as ‘offensive’ to a protected group.

The second trick is to take ‘justice’ and apply it, not to equality of opportunity, but to equality of outcome. This means that they can take any group differences of outcome – i.e. white people earning more than black ones – as evidence of ‘systemic’ discrimination.

In this way, the shadowy notion of fighting ‘systemic’ or ‘structural’ racism becomes the end, which justifies the suspension of reason and the violation of the liberty of the ‘oppressor’ (read: white, male) who stands in the way of righting historic wrongs.

Suggested reading

Why aren't illiberal universities challenged?

By Nigel Biggar

In short, their perfectionist, no-holds-barred vision justifies their illiberalism and unreason – much as fascism once did, and as socialism continues to in North Korea and Venezuela. Though sometimes violent, more often they use the perceived wrongdoing to gun for people’s jobs, reputations and livelihoods. 

Failing this, they aim to make the purported offender’s life as uncomfortable as possible in the hope they will be forced out. One way of doing this – and something I’ve encountered on several occasions – is by bombarding a university’s social media account with complaints in order to force a (mandatory) investigation by administrators.

The net result is to purge the campus of wrongthink. And the activists have almost succeeded: cultural conservatives in the social sciences and humanities in the anglosphere are nearly extinct, and libertarians are scarce outside economics. 

Their struggle for ‘social justice’ is a sacred one, as are its sites of resistance. Noah Carl’s presence at Cambridge was held to profane the sacred, since it violated the role the social justice Left demands of the modern university: that it act as a progressive safe space from the unjust world beyond.

Hence the open letter signed by numerous academics and students – a tactic which Jonathan Haidt remarks is now a staple of progressive activism – in which Noah was attacked as a ‘race scientist’.

But scrub away the patina of guilt-by-association, conceptual stretching and innuendo, and the radicals’ case quickly evaporates. What emerges is a thoroughly dishonest smear campaign, in which ideologues created a superficial narrative and used political pressure to ruin an individual’s career. 

Suggested reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Noah does a nice job of responding to his critics point-by-point, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll summarise their stitch-up. The signatories’ defining charge is that Noah is a ‘race scientist’. This is incredible given that Noah hasn’t worked on, or made any definitive claims about, the relationship between race and intelligence. What he has done is to make the libertarian and rationalist case that scholars should be free to seek the truth, however uncomfortable. 

We won’t know whether race really is connected to intelligence until the gene-level relationships that define the two are mapped at some point in the future. I suspect the data will show a mess of weak and contradictory correlations, which may be why current work has difficulty with anomalies such as why black Americans are so much more successful than (ostensibly more intelligent Asiatic) Inuit and Eskimo. In any event, inter-racial marriage and – who knows? – gene-editing mean race and IQ is unlikely to be much of a talking point a century from now. 

But this is beside the point. Noah’s argument is that university researchers need to have the freedom to conduct research on all manner of subjects – indeed, James Flynn, who argues that environment rather than genes is responsible for race-IQ differences, has decried the stigma attached to research in this area. How else could he prove his case? 

Indeed, there is nothing nefarious about this research. Even measuring skulls is not inherently sinister. The early 20th-century eugenicists who used this technique to argue that southern and eastern European immigrants to America were inferior to the ‘Nordic’ natives were hoist on their own petard by Franz Boas, who showed that the US-born children of non-Nordics had the same skull sizes as American-born Nordics.

And a properly functioning scientific culture would have just as swiftly debunked the ad hoc excuses used to explain away African-Americans’ lower criminality rate (than whites) in the early 20th century. 

More from this author

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah also points out that the Nazis actually opposed the study of race and intelligence because the results favoured Jews. Instead they, like all ideologues, cherry-picked what they wanted from both religious and secular belief systems. The fact anti-minority eugenics won out wasn’t due to science, but to dominant ideologies which stood in the way of rigorous analysis.

Today’s social justice ideologues are much closer to the spirit of the Nazis than social scientists such as Noah whose methods are transparent and findings falsifiable.

If someone tries to broadcast the claims of race science, a case can be made that this harms the self-efficacy of black people and so should be discouraged. We know that when methods of suicide are widely publicised in the media, suicide goes up.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study suicide methods. As African-American linguist John McWhorter argues, the subject of race and intelligence can be quietly investigated without broadcasting the results. When progressives kick up a storm about this, they publicise the very findings they claim to be harmful. 

Of course, one may disagree with all this using data or logic. But disagreement is Noah’s point. He has not done work on race and intelligence; he has only defended the right of other academics to do so. He is a libertarian and contrarian, but – and I say this as one who has lost relatives in the Holocaust – he is certainly not a racist. His interest in academically taboo subjects stems from his contrarian curiosity and belief in the importance of academic freedom.

Suggested reading

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

He was also accused of attending a ‘secret’ conference on intelligence to discuss race science; but it turns out to have been an innocuous invitation-only event (common in academia) attended by a multiracial array of scholars studying numerous aspects of intelligence, few of which concern race. The supposedly ‘far Right’ journals he published in, also cited as evidence of his unsuitability, turn out to be publications with similarly global editorial boards and varied interests. 

Furthermore, the allegedly ‘shoddy’ methods used in some of his lower-tier publications are actually the standard methods used in thousands of academic papers that focus on country-level data. Finally, in contrast to the charge levelled by his critics, he didn’t hide any of his published work from the evaluation committee.

The links in the progressive activists’ join-the-dots story of ‘race scientist helping the far Right’ are spurious – based on guilt-by-association or outright ignorance. Like his Oxford doctoral supervisors, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Noah, and to know that he is an honest, personable scholar. He has done nothing wrong and his struggle is vital if we are to restore reason and freedom in academia and beyond. 

Perhaps it will be the same with the latest scandal surrounding him and – this time – Cambridge University. Late last year, some people associated with the university raised the possibility that Peterson (who is currently on leave from his teaching position at the University of Toronto) might like to take up a temporary post as a visiting fellow in the Faculty of Divinity. Peterson had planned to use the position to prepare for a series of lectures on the book of Exodus (following on from his hugely successful lectures on the book of Genesis).

The arrangement could have benefited both parties. Peterson would have been able to enjoy the contributions of other fellows at Cambridge, while the university could have shown itself to be at the absolute forefront of the great discussions and the big issues of our time.

More from this author

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Aside from his body of academic work, one of Peterson’s achievements as an intellectual has been one that very few academics in our age has managed – he has taken academic discussions out into the widest possible public realm. Is there any other public figure who can fill auditoriums around the world night after night with people willing listen to serious and deep lectures on everything from the Bible and Dostoyevsky to neurology and metaphysics? Cambridge would be hard pressed to find another such person. Or anyone who could even come close.

But it wouldn’t have simply been a matter of the University acquiring his ‘star status’. Nor of giving the students greater access to someone for whom they have a great appetite – as Peterson’s packed audiences in the city (including at the Cambridge Union) last year showed. Most important was the opportunity it would have given Cambridge to show that it was a class apart. Specifically, that was above the kind of low-grade, intellectually numbing, identity-politicking of our time.

There is a tendency to assume that the worst of the no-platforming, safe-space, snowflake ideology only exists at the lowest-grade universities, and that the higher up the academic food-chain you go, the less the insistence on intellectual uniformity is tolerated. Certainly, the University of Chicago has tried to lead a way out of the anti-free speech movements of our time, as did Oxford a few years ago when the Chancellor of that University told students that those unwilling to embrace freedom of thought should “think about being educated elsewhere”.

More from this author

Test article

By Douglas Murray

That is the attitude that a world-class university should take. By giving Jordan Peterson even a temporary berth, Cambridge could have demonstrated that it too was going to lead the way out of the mire that lesser institutions have positively immersed themselves in.

But it has not. Before the university even had the decency to alert Peterson to the fact, it was announced that the offer of a visiting fellowship had been rescinded. And the University itself was not even the one to break the news that the offer had been rescinded. That pleasure – for pleasure it must have been for them – went to the Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) which announced the news on social media before the faculty itself made the announcement.

It is clearly this group of students who have put pressure on the academics of the Divinity Faculty to rescind the offer. And it is clear from the content of this article on Varsity what the basis of those complaints must have been.

The laundry list of insinuations and accusations include the issue of gender pronouns (naturally) and also such damning facts as the claim that the accused has “further described the concept of white privilege as a ‘Marxist lie'”. As though anybody could ever have even thought such a thing.

Crowing about their victory, the CUSU said:

“We are relieved to hear that Jordan Peterson’s request for a visiting fellowship to Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity has been rescinded following further review. It is a political act to associate the University with an academic’s work through offers which legitimise figures such as Peterson.”

They went on to claim, “His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.”

It would require a thesis to unpick the number of fallacies and presumptions in that statement.  For example, the idea that employing Peterson is a political act unlike the recruitment of other academics (are other academics either wholly non-political or political in the ‘correct’ direction?) and the assumption that in order to be at a university, a professor must be “representative of the student body” and much more.

When Peterson was in Cambridge last year he was certainly of enormous interest to the student body. Otherwise he would hardly have packed out of each of his venues. All that the CUSU exercise in neo-bureaucrat-ese proves is that the standard of students, like the standard of faculty, has obviously diminished in Cambridge of late.

Peterson has issued a statement that is justifiably angry. Everything about the University’s behaviour has been shabby – up to and including the claim that Peterson chased the divinity faculty to have a place at the university, rather than the other way around.

More from this author

Jordan Peterson for President (yes, I know)

By Peter Franklin

But as with most other episodes involving Peterson, what starts out as a controversy turns into a societal biopsy. On this occasion, it is not only Cambridge University which has been exposed, but other institutions, including the media. For how did the London Times choose to report the news? By running the story under the headline Cambridge turns away alt-right darling Jordan Peterson.

You can learn so much about from a headline like that. Not about the subject of the piece, but about the media that would run it. Of all the things they could have used as a prefix to discuss Peterson (global bestselling author, internationally renowned thinker, world’s most famous Canadian), why choose that drive-by shooting of a description: “alt-Right darling”. A claim which is simultaneously just short of libellous, craftily misleading and undisguisedly contemptuous.

But as I say, this just goes to prove something that Peterson has proved plenty of times before. Those institutions and entities that try to assail him inadvertently end up revealing far too much about their own presumptions and prejudices. And they, not him, are left looking not just shallow, but unmistakably callow.