Yesterday, Varsity reported that Cambridge professor Ross Anderson had predicted that Brexit would do “intolerable damage” to the University in costing it approximately £100m a year. Varsity spoke exclusively to Professor Anderson to delve further into his views.  

How seriously should we take the threat to British funding from the tech sector - given that the relationship of a post-Brexit Britain with the EEA is pretty indeterminate at the moment, isn't it too early to be predicting a run on tech sector funding?

This is deadly serious. I've given the figures in my paper; we got £69m this year from the EU and I reckon we'd lose at least £60m of that. We might get some crumbs as subcontractors to universities elsewhere, but almost all of it would go.

Also, Bill Gates himself made clear that Cambridge would be a lower priority for research funding post-Brexit - and he's said that if he knew it was a possibility he'd have put MS Research Cambridge in Paris instead.

That deal brought not just MS Research but £105m in donations to set up the Gates scholarships.

Please look also at my piece on network effects and Brexit, which describes the likely impact on the tech industry:

How many of Cambridge's foreign students come from the EU as compared to extra-EU students, and by extension how significant could the damage be to student numbers?

 We don't publish easy numbers that discriminate between UK and EU students as they are all considered "home". We have 14,156 home students and 4,138 from overseas, plus 5 from the Channel Islands and Isle of Man. You can pull out numbers by nationality, which gives the total non-UK student numbers as 8,273. So there are almost exactly the same number of EU, non-UK as non-EU.

I'm assuming we lose at least £20m of £237m fee income, which is conservative as a post-Brexit government would surely be even nastier about visas than the current lot, which already costs us students.

Could you elaborate on why you described the Leave campaign as “a campaign of xenophobia”?

When UKIP won its by-election in Clacton, someone on the street called my wife by the N-word - the first open racial abuse she suffered in over 20 years living in Cambridge. The rhetoric then was about immigration, and in the last three weeks it has got very much worse.

The exit campaign only started drawing ahead once not just Farage but Johnson, Gove and then rest of them started banging on about the subject. This will empower people who harbour racist attitudes, but who have kept them to themselves for the last 20 years as they're not socially acceptable. Minorities, and immigrants, and first-generation and second-generation Brits, are feeling this.

It's not just people with family members from Asia and Africa; it's Jewish people too, and Poles, and Danes, and French people as well. The one member of my family who planned to vote for leave has switched to remain for this reason. A leave vote would do grave damage to the fabric of society.

Would you agree that the Remain campaign is guilty of equally unpleasant scaremongering rhetoric?

I don't accept that when the governor of the Bank of England warns of the likely economic consequences, that's scaremongering. He's just doing his job. It is totally reprehensible for Michael Gove to liken him (and by extension me) to Nazi scientists in the Daily Mail.

Ever heard of Godwin's law?

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