Harry Clynch

In an act of thinly veiled class war, news broke this week that the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) has decided to stop hosting two of the longest running fixtures in English cricket history: the annual Eton versus Harrow and Oxford versus Cambridge matches. A sporting tradition that stretches back 200 years is no more, as Lord’s becomes the latest institution to embrace the all-encompassing need for change. In a written statement, the MCC argued that cancelling the historic fixtures would help ‘broaden’ the fixture list and give a ‘wider range of players’ the chance to play at Lord’s.

Last week, the Cambridge Union hosted a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes there is no such thing as good taste.’ During the debate, the prominent and respected art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon made the point that humans have an instinctive feeling for what is beautiful and what is repellent. There are obvious, undeniable examples of good and poor taste. To demonstrate this, he staged a long impersonation of Hitler’s views on ‘degenerate’ modern art. His parody included many offensive and racist comments of the sort you would expect from Der Fuhrer. Graham-Dixon’s argument was clear, even if his impression of Hitler was shaky and his presentation somewhat eccentric.

When I first started at Churchill College, Cambridge, I was proud that I had joined an institution whose very existence was a testament to the legacy of a personal and national hero. As I walked around the college grounds, I felt that I was now part of a community that was much bigger than myself; a community partly defined by the life and times of our country’s greatest leader. Standing for the college toast at my first formal dinner, the words ‘To Sir Winston, and the Queen’ almost made me believe that my own life was now, in a small but important way, linked to the life of the great man himself. It seems that the college leadership, however, don’t feel the same way.

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.