Oxbridge will carry on being woke

Hurrah. The dreadful, ultra-woke Professor Stephen Toope, vicechancellor of Cambridge and the man responsible for trashing the university’s reputation for intellectual integrity, has decided to quit Cambridge and slope off back to Canada, from whence he sprang.

Just because the man who wanted to encourage staff and students to inform on each other for “microaggressions”, and who cosied up to China in the most hypocritical of ways, has gone does not mean that the era of woke Oxbridge is over – as recent doings at Worcester College, Oxford make clear.

Last week, the college apologised to students for the “distress caused” by hosting a Christian conference while the college was closed for summer. Students had complained that the event was “Islamophobic”, due to a discussion about “the nature of Islam” and had a meltdown over the fact that one speaker reportedly had links to gay conversion therapy.

The provost of Worcester College, David Isaac, and the man understood to have ordered the investigation into the event, was formerly chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission when it issued guidelines to protect freedom of expression. Has he been brainwashed by Oxbridge culture and gone the way of Toope? It seems, sadly, that he has: another casualty of the culture wars.

However, it’s the students who need to be reprogrammed. That they could feel “distress”, and then complain after finding a pamphlet hanging around college pertaining to the Christian Concern conference that had nothing to do with them, is spine-chilling. It’s a sad case of chicken and egg at Oxbridge: is it the craven vice-chancellors and provosts giving in to – or encouraging

– the increasingly manipulative, ideological students that are to blame? Or vice versa?

Either way, it’s bad.