Oxbridge intolerance

SIR – You report (September 20) that Oxbridge junior and middle common rooms will be exempt from legal action for no-platforming speakers.

When I was at Cambridge in the 1980s, the JCR of my college, Sidney Sussex, voted – as usual, on a late night, in a smoky room, with a Left-wing minority in attendance – to stop taking all News International titles (the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World) and Mirror Group titles (the Daily Mirror and Sunday People).

The reasons were different, but the result was that the students of a college in one of the greatest universities in the world were denied access to publications on both sides of the political spectrum.

Quite apart from the fact that this probably had the unintended effect of driving up sales – as students were forced to buy their own copies of these newspapers rather than reading the ones in the common room – it was also a perfect example of a narrow elite isolating itself from the very world it claimed to represent.

Oxbridge will be reduced to nothing if its students are not allowed to consider everything. If the new laws do not apply to our best universities, they will soon not be worthy of the name.

Victor Launert

Matlock Bath, Derbyshire