The University of Cambridge doesn’t seem to be very good at PR.

These last two weeks, we’ve seen the rather lenient wrist-slapping of a paedophile Don, and now a student has been sent down for two and a half years for taking part in a protest. It doesn’t sound quite right – surely this is just another own goal in the long list of that our wonderful institution seems to score against itself. To single out a student seems bizarre at best – unless there is information that we haven’t yet been told.

Now don’t get me wrong – I fundamentally oppose any attempt to shutdown an event when the sole reason for doing so is because someone with a differing view to one’s own is speaking. David Willetts, the Universities Minister, has undoubtedly upset a good number of students and Fellows alike in his higher education ‘plans’ (education plans, we must admit, that were a natural conclusion to Higher Ambitions, the Mandelson-sponsored Labour predecessor). So I was fairly appalled by the crass way in which our so-called saviours, some of whom hailed from Cambridge ‘Defend’ Education, attempted to destroy the idea of debate.

But the whole argument got a bit more convoluted yesterday when a petition against the suspension, partly fronted by CUSU, declared that ‘opposition to the government's higher education policies is a stated aim of a broad range of organisations’. In what way is this relevant to the petition? Rather, it gives implicit support to the protest as a method of ‘opposition’. I do not support the government plans. I do not, however, see the Willetts-silencing protest as anything other than misjudged, childish and useless. Therefore, I do not see this rustication as having anything to do with ideology, and nor, seemingly, does the university court, given their ruling on grounds of freedom of speech. It seems that the petition’s accompanying statement attempts to justify the actions of the far left by lumping an ideological viewpoint with the petition itself – and it will deter people from signing it.

CDE didn’t help themselves by tweeting in response to the court ruling, ‘i hope they understand that this means war’. What on earth does that mean? Why are they so imprudent that they can’t recognise that the best way to win an argument is to stick to the parameters in which that argument is framed. Students who protest do so in a country where it’s legal, and where we should defend that legal right. They also go to a university which prides itself on freedom of speech – something they prevented on that day. How they manage to do their degrees at the same time, I have no idea. And for some in the protest movement, two and a half years away from studying won’t be much of a change, I might uncharitably suggest.

But taking it all together, and rising above the nonsense spouted by the self-confessed radicals, I still support and have signed the petition against the sentence, on the sole grounds that it is disproportionate and will not further the university’s efforts to encourage freedom of speech. The university should have every right to punish people who obstruct lectures, occupy their property and prevent freedom of speech, but they should be proportionate about it.

But those that I see as extremists should be warned: your aggressive, all pervasive, flawed ideological posturing is unhelpful to your cause, and may one day mean that you lose any empathy the rest of us might otherwise feel.