Toby Young Toby Young

Cambridge’s shameful decision to rescind Jordan Peterson’s visiting fellowship

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s ‘Freedom of Expression’ guide for higher education providers and students’ unions in England and Wales, no speaker has a right to be invited to speak to students on a provider’s premises, but once someone has been invited they should not then be disinvited. It even suggests this may be a breach of Section 43 of the Education (No 2) Act 1986, which places a legal duty on universities to take ‘reasonably practicable’ steps to protect freedom of speech.

Please, God, let Jordan Peterson sue Cambridge University for having invited him to take up a visiting fellowship, only to rescind the invitation after a bunch of snowflake undergraduates said they would scweam and scweam until they made themselves sick. Okay, they didn’t actually say that, but they might as well have done, the pathetic, passive-aggressive cry-bullies.

In a report in Varsity, the Cambridge student newspaper, which is so craven in its forelock-tugging obeisance to the protesting students it makes Pravda look like the work of John Milton, we learn that Peterson isn’t welcome at Cambridge because it’s – wait for it – an ‘inclusive environment’. (In case you’re not au fait with the current jargon, that means an environment in which everyone looks different but thinks exactly the same.) There then follows a laundry list of Peterson’s unforgivable sins: he believes ‘white privilege’ is a ‘Marxist lie’, that ‘the patriarchy’ is ‘predicated on competence’, that ‘the West has lost faith in masculinity’, that ‘global warming posturing is a masquerade for anti-capitalists to have a go at the Western patriarchy’ and that ‘men are victims of gender oppression’.

In other words, he’s not welcome at Europe’s number one university because he has the temerity to challenge the status quo.

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