I worry what will become of my beloved Cambridge
used to loved Cambridge; its dense, ancient beauty and social intensity cast a spell. Above all, throughout both of the degrees I did there, I loved the wild eccentricities of its elder geniuses.
The death last week of Norman Stone, a brilliant historian of Eastern Europe who spoke eight languages fluently, including Turkish, was a melancholy reminder of a vanished era. Stone read history at Cambridge in the late 1950s, teaching there for many years before taking up the Oxford chair in modern history.
He was also an alcoholic who lavished drink and wit on his favourite supervisees, authored some of the best books ever written on the Eastern Front; flirted wildly; had numerous affairs with female students, and taught students of both sexes to think. He hated political orthodoxies and particularly those on the Left.
The age of the Norman Stones of the world is gone for good. Cambridge is too busy with self-immolating racial pieties, with top-level decisions increasingly governed by a body of politically correct, race-obsessed vigilantes. Too many now prefer to see Cambridge as a quagmire of racism and privilege, choosing to measure its diversity by counting skin colours instead of by the intellectual diversity that once made it great.
So it was with nausea, but not surprise, that I saw the latest attempt to reduce Cambridge to a racist swamp by yet another Lefty bent on martyrdom. This took the form of an ostentatious “Withdrawal statement” posted online by a doctoral student called Indiana Seresin. Part j’accuse (to Cambridge) and part selfcongratulation, the much-applauded post tells of her decision – nay, her compulsion – to abandon her Arts Council-funded PhD at King’s College.
Seresin, a (white) Harvard graduate, primly states: “I am withdrawing from my PhD due to the racism I have witnessed”, before going on to intone, with the hallmark pomposity of the virtue-drunk Left, that “it is always tricky to know whether to divest one’s energy from an unjust institution or to stay and fight to improve it”.
Luckily perhaps for Cambridge, Seresin has decided to divest. The “racist incidents” she cites include an English lecturer reading out loud the N-word from a text under discussion. Then there was the row over the so-called “racist” profiling by porters at King’s College last summer. The porters had declined to call a don of Indian heritage by her academic title. That this was racism was an allegation that some, including this newspaper, rightly questioned. As they explained at the time, the porters do not address anyone by academic title. This is irreverent, but hardly racist.
The substance of Seresin’s screed, however, is more telling. It concerns her displeasure at the racial make-up of Cambridge staff and students. Cambridge, and particularly the English faculty, has far too many white lecturers and students, and too few black ones for her taste. This, she insists, makes the department and the university “intellectually impoverished” – unbearably so, for her, at any rate.
Fewer than 3 per cent of undergraduates at Cambridge (or Oxford) are black. But is this rampant racism? Not according to the Cambridge Afro-Caribbean Society, which has said Cambridge should not be “attacked” for low numbers of black students. Daniel Oluboyede, 19, a medical student from Wandsworth, London, whose application was assisted by the Target Oxbridge scheme, told this newspaper that “the rate will not increase if the number of applications remains the same”, citing complex “social reasons”, rather than racism on Cambridge’s part.
In fact, the university has been bending over backwards to tackle race-related issues.
It is conducting an inquisition into its historic ties to the slave trade, a three-year project dedicated to naming and shaming dead scholars involved in “supporting, reinforcing and sometimes contesting racial attitudes which are repugnant in the 21st century”, with the ultimate goal of finding “appropriate ways for the university to publicly acknowledge” its links to slavery.
On the diversity front, it is engaged
It has made Cambridge a place where thinking out of the box can get you tossed out
in large-scale research to help boost numbers of black applicants. I’m all for as many people as possible having a shot at the top universities, as students, lecturers or indeed masters. And while some of Cambridge’s diversity initiatives may see results, the prevalent narrative among right-on students and staff is destructive, and I find its stiff-necked, authoritarian watchfulness sinister.
Indeed, it has already made Cambridge a place where thinking out of the box can get you tossed out. The craven dismissal last year of Noah Carl, a postdoc in sociology at St Edmund’s College, shocked some onlookers.
Fellow academics found out that his research probed connections between IQ and genes. Without apparently reading it or speaking to him, 1,400 Cambridge students and academics composed one of their notorious open letters, accusing him of racist, eugenicist research, which, they suggested, was morally polluting Cambridge. He had to be removed.
The speed with which their prey was dispatched, and the spinelessness of Matthew Bullock, the college’s master, inspired a set of countersignatories to side with Carl, who is now crowdfunding a legal action against St Edmund’s.
The strangulation of the spirit of free inquiry is deeply depressing. But while Cambridge may never get back the special culture associated with rule-breaking free spirits like Norman Stone, the fightback from Noah Carl and friends shows the jig is not quite up – yet.