Cambridge should be a bastion of excellence – not social engineering
Stephen Toope’s grand designs for widening participation don’t serve anyone at all – except him and his overpaid cronies
As an undergraduate at Cambridge, I didn’t have a particularly good time. I was too busy worrying about how much more brilliant and popular everyone else seemed to be, to take advantage of the intellectual resources and historical beauty on offer. But since then, I have come to appreciate it.
During my MPhil, for which I returned aged 30, I feasted on the richness of the (public) undergraduate lectures – almost all of which I missed as an indolent, unappreciative student. But my favourite thing of all was – and is – the heavily subsidised nightly college dinners, where one can ignore the food in favour of conversation with famous physicists, top-drawer numismatists, professors of French literature or Renaissance Florentine music and experts on the finer points of sewage tunnel construction – in rooms weighted down with history, lubricated with wines from ancient cellars. This is the magic that can only be produced by an institution shaped around unabashedly high intellectual standards, great riches, long history, and the very best libations. To me, it is heaven.
But all this is on the way out, courtesy of strong forces pushing as hard as possible to destroy it. The strongest force of all is arguably Cambridge’s worst choice of vicechancellor in history: the outgoing Stephen Toope, who really ought to have always stayed in Canada, from whence he came, a country which, like its neighbour America, has embraced the greatest excesses of diversity ideology already.
Despite his early departure in September, two years short of his seven-year term, Toope remains relentless in his mission of dismantling Cambridge. Having spent the past five years obsessed with deconstructing what he considers to be “racist” structures, his parting blow appears to resemble a vision of class that wouldn’t have been out of place in East Germany circa 1984. “I would say we have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds,” he said last week.
Almost comically, Toope then said he wasn’t “a big fan” of social engineering – before going on to explicate the precise background the new recruits should have: on free school meals and living in impoverished areas. “If all we’re doing is substituting more grammar school students for students from independent schools, well, that’s not really accomplishing the widening participation goals,” he wheedled. What was that about social engineering again?
Indeed, the problem with Toope’s grand designs for “widening participation” is that they don’t serve anyone at all – except him and his overpaid cronies. Quite the opposite: they are full-frontal attacks on the rudiments of academic inquiry and, most important of all, the university’s ability to recruit students of the best intellectual quality, which include dirt-poor but gifted students on scholarships at good schools.
As one self-described low earner and single mother of three, whose three kids slaved away to get full scholarships to private schools, put it last week, “My expectation is that Cambridge and Oxford simply take the best… My youngest recently told me she’d like to go to Oxford or Cambridge. I don’t want to hear now that she’ll be prejudiced against.”
There will now be a great many talented children like hers who are not from privileged backgrounds but who, under a Toope vision, won’t stand a chance.
Class is only one battlefield in Toope’s war on quality. Under his stewardship, Cambridge has been edging ever closer to its deranged American counterparts for several years. There was his disastrous mandate that students report faculty “microaggressions” anonymously online – including such crimes as raising your eyebrows in a menacing fashion and “stereotyping” religions. It was such a silly and harmful idea that even Toope U-turned on it.
Another of his mandates was that, in pursuit of a sorely garbled version of “free speech”, all at Cambridge would have to “respect” all other views and “identities”. As this was patently suicide for intellectual freedom and critical thinking – not to mention the basic liberty to dislike or roll your eyes at whatever you choose – there was uproar, and it too was binned.
Emboldened by his zealotry, in the last few years woke dons and students have had a field day. This year, a selection of Jesus College undergraduates, shepherded by the college master Sonita Alleyne, passionately campaigned to get a memorial plaque of an 18th-century college benefactor called Tobias Rustat removed from the chapel because his small stake in slave-owning rendered the chapel “unsafe”.
At last, at court level, the demand was overruled, much to Ms Alleyne’s fury – though with one in three students being “of colour” in the 2020 Jesus intake, and over four in five students from state schools, it would be hard to argue that the college was a bastion of structural racism and classism.
Toope’s early departure is a blessing, but we have to hope that whoever follows does not also hate the ideas of merit and intellectual freedom, or indeed, the whole idea of Cambridge itself. And perhaps there is cause for hope. After all, following vigorous debate and heavy consultation, the Tobias Rustat plaque is to stay, unsafely and dangerously hanging in the Jesus College chapel. And Cambridge is still home to a high concentration of clever people driven by the pursuit of knowledge. If woke social engineering projects curtail this pursuit too far, even they might begin to push back. At least I hope so – not least for the sake of the chat at those magnificent college dinners.
His parting blow appears to resemble a vision of class that wouldn’t have been out of place in East Germany circa 1984