Universities wrong to be stampeded by students’ fashionable ideas

SIR – As a Cambridge graduate and former vice-chancellor of another university, I have recently completed, with some effort, the endowment of a teaching fellowship in English at a Cambridge college.

I therefore read with concern, though not surprise, your report (October 26) suggesting that the university might yield to pressures to “decolonise” the English syllabus.

My fellowship is within the Faculty of English, not of “World Literature” or even “Contemporary English Literature”.

It is wholly proper and desirable that syllabuses should evolve with experience. It is not proper that they should be precipitately changed to satisfy the current fashions of a passing cohort of students, even if supported by a few academics. In my experience these crises pass as, perforce, does any cohort of students.

Universities should not kowtow to yesterday’s men like me, still less to benefactors. But they should perhaps note opinion in these quarters.

I do hope Cambridge’s experienced new vice-chancellor leads a fair and, above all, firm response to the present challenge. Sir Laurence Martin

London WC1

SIR – Allister Heath (Comment, October 26) writes with admirable passion about the perceived threats to academic freedom within British universities. It is true that, when facts at last emerge from the clag of Twitterstorms, intellectual freedom is periodically challenged from within and without.

The press, however, is only too quick to treat the fringe campaigns of a shrill minority as reflective of the academic community more broadly. Universities remain the country’s most free and frank forums for open debate: lecturers can devise syllabuses without constraint and analyse subjects as they choose; students can say what they like and disagree with their lecturers without consequence.

Reasoned argument is the only currency that counts. If it be objected that universities are more Left-leaning than society at large, this phenomenon has affected lecturers for a century or so, and those of student age since – one suspects – the dawn of Man.

The only appreciable danger is not that freedom of speech or scholarship be curtailed – since every academic will fight that tooth and nail – but that society reach the lazy conclusion that universities have ceased to be the true crucible of intellectual innovation. Dr David Butterfield

Queens’ College, Cambridge

SIR – I didn’t go to university. I have spent the past 10 years working in the unionised rail industry, meeting and arguing beliefs with a wide range of people. To me, debate being restricted by some “safe space”, biased to one ideology with others excluded, would be a great disadvantage.

It invites the question: what is university for? Charles Allen

Wrexham