For students, there’s no winning the culture war

The national press is using universities to stoke the culture war, and the Cambridge Union is complicit.

Last Thursday, the Union debated the motion: “This house believes in the right to offend”. Speaking in favour of this surely irrefutable motion were highly controversial gender-critical feminist Dr Kathleen Stock, and Cambridge Professor Arif Ahmed. There were no invited speakers arguing for the opposition.

Whilst protesters exercised their right to free speech outside the chamber, members exercised theirs inside, and voted comfortably in favour of the right to offend: 247 votes to 72.

The Times wrote up the debate, in an article endorsed as ‘excellent’ by Union President Lara Brown. The title of the piece? “Cambridge University students ‘fear being offensive’”.

I’m no journalist, but I would suggest that a more accurate headline might be “Cambridge students vote overwhelmingly in favour of the right to offend.” But you won’t see that article in the Times, the Daily Mail, or even on the BBC. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the favoured national narrative – that students are entitled, woke, out-of-touch snowflakes.

The author of the Times’ write-up is only one of many parasitic journalists, pundits, and politicians gorging themselves on Oxbridge clickbait. Cast your mind back to the most scandalous incident of 2021: when Magdalene College Oxford MCR took down a photo of the Queen that had been in their common room since 2013. From the wall-to-wall media coverage of the ‘incident’, you’d think Oxford had just declared itself a secessionist republic. It was discussed on countless radio stations; in print in the Times, the BBC, the Mail, the Guardian, the Independent, and the Sun; and commented on by the education secretary, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and a spokesperson for then-prime minister Boris Johnson.

The removal of the photo was met with paroxysms of national outrage, and blanket condemnation of out-of-touch, disrespectful, woke Oxford students.

How many students voted to take the print down? 10.

The Union is no stranger to deliberately courting culture war controversy and trying to generate these sorts of viral moments, but this term has been worse than usual. Last week, debate speaker Calvin Robinson - obviously butthurt because Union members treated him with exactly as much seriousness as he deserves – took to tweeting attacks on individual students that racked up thousands of likes, and trawling Camfess for content to mock, like a well-adjusted adult. We were mercifully spared Toby Young (so in demand that he was nabbed by the Oxford Union for their original motion “This house believes Woke Culture has gone too far”), and Charlie Kirk, who needed a time out after the Republican’s loss in Arizona.

My objection is not primarily that these speakers are interminably boring (though they are), or that some have a tenuous grip on reality. It’s that the only purpose served by a termcard full of such speakers is to make a spectacle not of the speakers, but of the Cambridge Union’s members. We become the national punchline, no matter how we behave or vote in the chamber. Good-faith debates and reasoned objections will not save Cambridge students from the ire of right-wing populists and their followers, or from the British media’s infantilisation. The truth never gets in the way of a good story.

It was a given that a Union debate on a culture war topic, featuring Kathleen Stock, and being filmed for a Channel 4 documentary on gender issues, would be picked up by the national print media. In fact, it was almost certainly intended to be. The clickbait headline of the Times’ piece “Cambridge University Students ‘fear being offensive’”, is clumsily paraphrased from Stock’s speech. The write-up contains multiple long quotes from Stock, and a quote from Ahmed. But the only student’s views represented are those that align with the intended narrative. There is no mention of the 247 students who decisively rejected the ‘snowflake’ position, and embraced the right to offend. The only allusion to the debate outcome is that Stock ‘won’.

We must stop letting the Union bait students into becoming the story. The offence debate was a performance, but not for our benefit.

Laura Ryan, Downing College

Mathmos can be Swifties too!

Sir,

I much agree with Ella Shattock’s excellent re-review of Taylor Swift’s new album, Midnights. I do have a significant qualm though. The author calls out Fitz Mathmos on being completely unaware of the goings on in the Taylor Swift world. I myself am a Fitz Mathmo, who not only sent in a letter complaining about the initial review, but who also recalls (briefly) speaking to the author (in person) about Midnights only a few days after the initial review.

An amused and bemused Isaac Kaufmann, Fitzwilliam College