Cambridge

It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The collective mistakes that have so damaged the Trust’s reputation were bound up in the rush of many institutions to ‘take the knee’, metaphorically and literally. Immensely delicate questions about how best to study the connections of Trust properties with slavery and (ill-chosen word) ‘colonialism’ were rushed and politicised. The view inevitably spread that the Trust now bears an animus towards the past whose glorious buildings and landscapes it is supposed to protect so that millions may enjoy them.

Was Winston Churchill a racist? For students like me who attended Churchill College, Cambridge, it's a question which barely even merits an answer: of course he wasn't. But some Cambridge academics appear to take a different approach when it comes to assessing the record of Britain's most famous prime minister. Churchill College recently announced a ‘year-long programme’ into Sir Winston’s allegedly ‘backward’ conceptions of empire and race. As part of this review, the college has held events such as ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill’. Many students are simply bemused. Academic debate is, of course, no bad thing. It is something to be encouraged at any university.

Professor Toope, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, had proposed a motion ordering all members of the university to ‘respect’ each other, or else. But significant numbers of members argued strongly against it, and rightly so: ‘respect’ is an emotional term implying deferential regard or special concern or solicitude for someone, a response more in line with the world of counselling and social welfare than with rigorous academic debate. Further, if ‘respect’ became justiciable because an academic appealed against dismissal from his job on that account, where would that end? Thankfully Professor Toope failed, as history suggests he should have. On the ancients’ intellectual agenda, respect had to be earned.

A struggle begins in Cambridge on Friday, which will determine the freedom to argue in the university. As the students of today are the elites of tomorrow, and as the same fight between liberalism and, for want of a better word, wokeism is being fought everywhere, it is an early skirmish in the fight over everyone’s freedom. At its heart is a distinction with a difference worth fighting over: the line between ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’. Tolerance is an old liberal virtue that is tougher than it looks. After the devastation brought by the wars of religion, the early Enlightenment decided, in the words of John Locke, that ‘the civil magistrate has no jurisdiction over souls’.

Last month, writing elsewhere, I quoted the website of the China Centre at Jesus College, Cambridge: ‘Under the leadership of the Communist party of China since 1978, [China] has experienced an extraordinary transformation… China’s national rejuvenation is returning the country to the position within the global political economy that it occupied before the 19th century.’ The tone sounded propagandist not academic. This month, all mention of the Chinese Communist party disappeared from the China Centre home page. Now the Centre says it concentrates on ‘mutual understanding between China and the West’, contributing to ‘harmonious global governance’, which should be ‘non-ideological and pragmatic’.

Dr Noah Carl, the young conservative academic who was fired from his Cambridge college after being targeted by a left-wing outrage mob, has decided to fight back. He is launching a campaign to crowdfund a legal action against St Edmund’s College, not just to restore his own reputation but to protect the rights of other scholars who find themselves being persecuted for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. ‘This isn’t about whether you agree with my research or my political views,’ he says. ‘This is about protecting freedom of speech, and standing up to the activists who are trying to control our universities. Hardly a week goes by without another case of someone being fired, or disinvited, or deplatformed, just for holding a certain viewpoint.

My great friend Dr Noah Carl joins a group of distinguished academics removed from their posts this spring. But while Jordan Peterson (visiting fellowship rescinded by Cambridge) and Sir Roger Scruton (sacked as a commission chair by James Brokenshire) can arguably hold their own and get on with their lives, Noah – an early-career Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge – has been fired from his only job, made unemployed by the braying mob. When Noah first told me of his appointment in Oxford’s Turf Tavern last year, it was a great cause for celebration. A Junior Research Fellowship is, after all, something of a holy grail for aspiring academics. Within weeks that joy turned to ashes in his mouth.

One should not rise to the bait, but the latest little ‘Rhodes must fall’ type story makes it hard. Cambridge University, of which Jan Smuts was once Chancellor, has removed his bust from public display. According to John Shakeshaft, the deputy chairman of the university’s governing council, Smuts has ‘uncomfortable contemporary significance’, as ‘part of the system that led to apartheid’. No mention that the party that Smuts led was the fierce opponent of the National Party, which introduced apartheid in South Africa. True, Smuts, like virtually every white leader of his generation, did not want full democratic rights for black people in South Africa, but there are other things to be said.

I return often to Cambridge and was there recently. Julian Glover, my partner, was talking to the History Society at Trinity about his new biography of Thomas Telford, the 18th-century roads, bridges and canals engineer. We spent the night at Trinity, and I had time to update my acquaintance with this fast-changing city. ‘Fast’ hardly does justice to the speed of change. ‘Silicon Fen’ may be a smart-Alecky sobriquet, but something huge is happening here, something very much of our time. Though the university nucleus remains reassuringly familiar, the river Cam sits at the centre of the biggest and most sustained expansion and boom I’ve ever seen in England.

To me, the strange words ‘Marsh Gibbon’ once meant I was nearly home. My heart lifted as we creaked and shuddered into the little station at Marsh Gibbon and Poundon, on the slow and pottering line between Cambridge and Oxford. Usually it was dusk by the time we got there, and I can remember seeing the gas lamps lit and flaring, a pleasing moment for anyone who likes a little melancholy. But equally remarkable was the lowness of the platform. Had it actually sunk into the marsh after which the desolate little halt was named? I recall a withered, gloomy porter in a peaked cap carefully setting steps by the door, for the few passengers wanting to alight at this mysterious destination. Without him, they would have had to jump.