Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Independent thought is dying at Cambridge University

Who on earth would want to be an academic in 2019? This is the question anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity must now be asking themselves. When a PhD student left Cambridge University last week on the grounds that a non-white lecturer ‘had repeatedly read out the n-word during class discussions’, I harboured a vain hope that the university might express support for the lecturer on the grounds that they were reading from a text and not using their own words. That would have been the logical stance to take.

Instead, we are seeing a capitulation to the accusations of students. Yesterday, it was revealed that the University is providing ‘reverse mentors’ for its academics to teach them about the dangers of institutional racism. How did Cambridge reach a situation where it’s students that rule the roost while academics are treated like school children?

The unspoken assumption is that if you are white and middle-aged you harbour inherent racist tendencies that must be expunged before you are intellectually pure enough to be allowed into a lecture theatre. An academic doesn’t even have to be offensive any more to be taken to task by the thought police: it is assumed that before you even open your mouth you are starting from a position of bias.

Even the term ‘reverse mentors’ is laughable: it implies that the BAME academics and students taking part were somehow inferior before they were mentors. How long will it be before an enlightened member of the student body takes issue with the phrase and the scheme is scrapped on the grounds that it too harbours subliminal racist intentions? I give it a week.

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