How Oxbridge’s ‘self-appointed morality crusades’ took cancel culture too far
As a Cambridge University undergraduate, Alfie* was on the committee of his college’s politics society. During his tenure, he suggested several guest speakers. Each name he put forward was vetoed by his peers for being right of centre. “It was that subtler side of cancel culture that I noticed constantly,” he says.
The students’ refusal to engage with views different from their own was no isolated case, but can be seen as part of a new campus censoriousness affecting Oxford and Cambridge as well as other universities.
Its victims include such supposed extremists as former Conservative Home Secretary Amber Rudd, whose invitation to speak at an Oxford University society was pulled in 2020, and former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, who is said to have been “quietly” no-platformed by students who might otherwise have asked him to speak at an event, were it not for his opinions.
Denying a platform to those with views deemed offensive raises its own issues. But a recent case of so-called cancel culture at Oxford University highlights a potentially more sinister side to this relatively recent outbreak of group condemnation. An inquest into the death of 20-year-old Alexander Rogers heard how the Oxford student killed himself after an allegation was made against him.
A female student had expressed “discomfort” about a sexual encounter with him, the inquest was reportedly told. Rogers’ friends are said to have told him he had “messed up” and that they needed space from him.
Nicholas Graham, area coroner for Oxfordshire, is reported to have said in his “findings of fact” that Rogers’ suicide was likely to have been influenced by the “isolation” he felt after being ostracised.
A serious incident review commissioned by Corpus Christi College, where he studied, subsequently pinpointed a “concerning culture of social ostracism” among some students.
“This culture, described as a form of ‘cancel culture’, involved the exclusion of students from social circles based on allegations of misconduct, often without due process or a fair hearing,” wrote Graham.
Cancel culture, it seems, has now come not only for public figures and academics, but also for students themselves. As Rogers’ story shows, it can have the gravest consequences. But from where has this culture arisen? And is it worse in the highly pressurised student communities of Oxford and Cambridge than at other universities?
Where unpalatable views are concerned, there has long been policing by students. The National Union of Students introduced a “No Platform” policy in 1974, in an attempt to block those with racist opinions from expressing them on campuses.
Fifty years on, the ensuing free speech debate continues to rage. But the censoring and ostracising of those at universities judged to have sinned in less well-defined ways, either by expressing “wrong” views, or by behaving with “wrong” conduct, appears to have escalated lately, with students themselves walking a moral tightrope.
“It was a very charged atmosphere, where I had to be incredibly careful with words,” says Alfie, who has now graduated. “The pernicious side of cancel culture was in the everyday. I watched lecturers and supervisors tiptoe around sensitive topics, labouring over their words to ensure they didn’t offend. And it’s so tedious – when you force people to watch their every word, you discourage honest discussion and you push people to the extremes.”
One recent Oxford graduate recalls a culture of what she calls “super-toxic bullying that people could justify.” She says: “Plenty of people had their university experience ruined due to one slip-up. All it took was one allegation and you’d be done for. A loud few people acted as judge, jury and executioner, which set the tone for a lot of the rest of college culture. I think most people hated it, but couldn’t speak up for fear of being cancelled themselves.”
A recent graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, meanwhile talks of a “group-think mentality” in which a “vocal minority paraded themselves as paragons of virtue”.
This was not the case a generation ago, but much has changed since. Social media has brought with it polarised debates and an ever-shifting roster of heroes and villains that has arguably permeated real world student culture.
“That would be my diagnosis,” agrees Jeff McMahan, Emeritus Sekyra and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. “All this ultimately derives from the fact that people started early on in social media to be vituperative and condemnatory because they could either be anonymous or invulnerable, as the people they were attacking were in distant places.
“So I do think social media and the internet are largely responsible for having produced this culture of vituperation.”
Yet even just a few years ago, this internet-fuelled censoriousness did not seem to have prevented what many young women described as a pervasive “rape culture” at secondary schools and universities. The online ‘Everyone’s Invited’ movement, which started in 2020, saw tens of thousands of young people anonymously share their experiences of sexual harassment, sexual bullying and worse. Social media and online porn were blamed for helping a misogynistic culture to flourish.
Are we now seeing a course correction, which perhaps threatens in some cases to go too far? “It could easily be an excessive backlash, a way of overcompensating for past injustices,” says Prof McMahan.
But there’s also a problem, he says, with students feeling “very self-righteous” about their moral views. “They seem to think they somehow know the truth about matters and anyone who disagrees with their views must be wicked.”
Although he describes himself as politically Left-wing, and takes many of the same positions on issues as the students doing the censoring, he diverges from them on one important point: “I don’t think we should treat everyone who disagrees with us as evil.”
Prof McMahan knows what it’s like to fall foul of cancel culture, after all. A critic of Israel, he was asked to withdraw from giving a lecture at the American University of Beirut in 2018 after someone checked his CV and discovered he was an adviser to the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He attended all the same, and was shouted down for 20 minutes.
“They presumed I was a baddie and shouldn’t be allowed to speak,” he says. “It shows it’s everywhere, not just in Europe and the US.”
The Oxbridge cases garner particular attention, however. This is perhaps due to the special place those universities hold in the British psyche, and the fact their unions secure such high profile speakers. When a row erupts, society takes notice.
But some Oxbridge graduates suggest the elite institutions may inherently be more susceptible to this new brand of moral censorship too. “It’s a growing problem at Oxbridge because people are passionate, intelligent and driven, which distorts and exaggerates every social trend,” says Alfie.
The college system means university life can be cloistered and intimate. Perhaps more than elsewhere, everyone knows your business and hiding places are few. “Where in other universities you’ll have friends in the hall that you’ll stay with, the college system at Oxbridge forces people to go into groups,” says the Peterhouse graduate.
“People who go to Oxbridge think of themselves as bright and smart, so overestimate their intellectual capabilities and self-righteousness. Colleges are so anxious to make it clear that the students are always right that they perpetuate these self-appointed crusades for morality that to any adult are potentially ridiculous, but for students, that’s their whole life.”
Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, 24, believes he has also experienced the sharp end of such culture. While reading Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, he submitted an article to the student newspaper in which he criticised what he claims is a campus culture of “reducing the evidence threshold” and shunning those who are alleged to have transgressed in the absence of proven wrongdoing. “That can destroy lives,” he says. “They will become not only social outcasts, but will struggle to get jobs in the future.”
But Kardos-Nyheim claims students on the newspaper decided his writing was “inflammatory” and rejected it. “They refused to platform the article, which I think revealed something insidious, which is that they don’t want to tolerate any points of view on this particular issue,” he says.
University cancel culture is particularly pronounced at Oxbridge, he believes, “in part because Oxbridge as institutions feel the need to constantly apologise and justify themselves in the new era of apology, where if you’re a successful institution, you must have done something wrong or immoral.”
In the worst case scenarios, lives may be lost. But there are other damaging outcomes too.
“The broader issue is a lack of viewpoint diversity,” says an Oxford academic who does not want to be named. “Those who go against the grain are ostracised. For universities that claim to place so much emphasis on diversity and inclusion, this is inherently exclusive and not diverse at all.”
The very mission of higher education is at stake, and independent thinking is at risk, he suggests. “Universities are where students should be taught how to think, not what to think. I feel we’re moving away from this, and the question is how to return to it.”
A joint spokesperson for the University of Oxford and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, says: “Oxford University and Corpus Christi College extend our deepest sympathies to Alexander’s family and everyone in our community who has been saddened by his tragic death.
“The College commissioned an independent review to identify all learning in this case with the aim of minimising the chance of such a tragic loss happening again. A College working group has been set up to take forward all the recommendations, a number of which have already been implemented. The University is also working on recommendations made by the review as part of its ongoing work on student welfare.
“The wellbeing of our students remains our absolute priority and we are committed to maintaining the safety of all those within our University and College community. Our thoughts remain with Alexander’s family and his friends.” The Telegraph approached the University of Cambridge for comment.
Prof McMahan, for his part, would like to see universities do more to defend free speech. Fittingly enough, not all who agree feel able to publicly say so.
*Name has been changed to protect anonymity