Mob rule at Cambridge

On Monday, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, Stephen Toope, issued a statement defending the decision of the divinity faculty to rescind its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson. The world-famous professor had been invited by the faculty to give a series of lectures on the Bible later this year, but was dis-invited after some academics and students objected.

Not that the faculty had the courtesy to inform Peterson of this, mind you. He learned about it through the grapevine and then saw it on Twitter. He was left to work out what had prompted the volte-face by reading the various statements given to the media. For instance, a spokesman for the university told the Guardian that Cambridge ‘is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles’. What these ‘principles’ are is anyone’s guess, but presumably they do not include free speech.

We now know a bit more about what went on behind the scenes, thanks to Toope’s statement. It was all to do with a slogan on a T-shirt, apparently. Five hundred years ago, biblical scholars at Cambridge poured over Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament into Latin; today, it’s a T-shirt slogan. And the offending item of clothing wasn’t even worn by Peterson. No, his sin was to be photographed at a public-speaking engagement next to someone in a T-shirt that read ‘I’m a proud Islamophobe.’ According to the vice-chancellor, ‘The casual endorsement by association of this message was thought to be antithetical to the work of a Faculty that prides itself in the advancement of interfaith understanding.’

The words ‘casual endorsement by association’ are doing quite a lot of work here. At Peterson’s public lectures, a VIP ticket entitles you to be photographed with him and, typically, hundreds are sold.