Oxford’s cancel culture is putting lives at risk
A desperately upsetting open secret that has been whispered around Oxford since January has finally come into the light.
Alexander Rogers, a 20-year-old materials science student at Corpus Christi College, took his own life after an allegation made against him by another student appears to have led him to believe that he had no other choice, or reason to live, when his peers – some of whom he regarded as close friends – chose to ostracise him.
The coroner has concluded that Mr Rogers’s suicide was the direct result of that allegation and the subsequent treatment he received from some of his friends.
Cut off from his support networks and clearly in the grip of a mental-health emergency, which persuaded him that there was no one he could turn to for help, he was very quickly overwhelmed by what Dr Dominique Thompson, a specialist mental-health GP and independent investigator, called a “pervasive cancel culture”.
Too many of our young people – and this is Oxford, remember, where the really clever ones are supposed to be – choose to bind themselves to a set of unwritten rules by which they are enjoined to live by a social-media-fuelled echo chamber.
Very few of them have close friendships with people with whom they disagree politically; tribes easily form. When a member of the pack is deemed to have erred, vengeance is immediate, ruthless and complete.
While Mr Rogers’s death has been understandably described as a tragedy, it is perhaps more appropriate to regard it as an outrage.
Tragedies are avoidable disasters in which it is difficult to find people to blame; outrages are entirely predictable and avoidable, and are linked to pinpointable human failure. In short, as the coroner has observed, Mr Rogers died because some of his friends chose, freely, to assume his guilt in the face of pressure to conform.
Dr Thompson noted a “pile-on” in which the default position within Corpus Christi became that Mr Rogers was to be shunned as a pariah. “It was shocking to hear that students were treating each other in this way,” she told the court, “but I was not surprised by this pattern of behaviour.”
Had Dr Thompson spent the last 10 years within or in close proximity to the college system at Oxford, she might have been less shocked.
The behaviour that Dr Thompson identified at Corpus Christi appears widespread. The tone of a college is set by its officers, but many welfare officers are graduate students, only a few years older than their charges and infused in the prevailing zeitgeist themselves. Too often they appear to bring their own agenda to proceedings; they are sometimes overseen by fellows who have neither interest nor competence in young people’s wellbeing, but serve by Buggins’s turn.
While not wishing to diminish the devastation that Mr Rogers’s death has wrought on his family, it is a miracle that similar incidents are not more common. Corpus Christi’s new dean of welfare, Prof Pete Nellist, said that the college would “identify all learnings” – whatever that means. Meanwhile, the academic registrar, Rachel Clifford, told students to inform her if the press got in touch – “including which organisation has contacted you”.
Make no mistake: when an allegation is made, the basic principles of justice demand that the complainant is taken seriously, and an investigation conducted. The same principles also demand that the person against whom the allegation is made is deemed to be innocent until a finding of guilt. We will never now know whether there was any truth in what was alleged against Mr Rogers, but I can say this with absolute certainty: he did not deserve to die for it.
Serenhedd James teaches History at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, and is Editor of the Catholic Herald