University challenge: conservatives are now the radicals on campus

On the letters page of the Sunday Times last month, the presidents of the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association were among the signatories to a letter boldly headlined ‘History must not be politicised’. They were incensed by a rumour that government funding might be cut for the Colonial Countryside project, which looks at possible connections between the British Empire, the slave trade and National Trust properties. Unable to recognise their own political bias, the letter-writers accused the government of ‘politicising’ history by trying to depoliticise it.

This extraordinary self-belief, this insistence that academics occupy the high moral ground, reflects what is happening in British universities, not least among my fellow historians. The marginalisation of those on the right is not new — but it is getting worse.

When I went up to Cambridge to read history in 1968 I thought of myself as left-wing, as a socialist. Karl Marx held no appeal, but I had my doubts about share-owning capitalists. My cure from these illusions began when I was an undergraduate at King’s, a college that gloried in its reputation as the radical powerhouse of Cambridge.

I soon learned that the King’s College Students’ Union had become a platform for views many did not share, but fewer were willing to oppose in public. The union committee was in the habit of sending telegrams to Ho Chi Minh exhorting him to keep up the just struggle against American imperialism. The union subscribed to three copies of the Morning Star, but bought only one Telegraph to console bourgeois capitalists.

But I did learn to be a dissident at King’s — just not the sort of dissident I was expected to be. I dissented from the views of the self-appointed dissenters from bourgeois capitalist society. I became the college correspondent of Varsity, the student paper that was shunned throughout King’s for its lack of revolutionary fervour.