How craven Cambridge University has fallen to the woke mob

Britain’s universities are now ruled by fear. Fear of associating with the wrong people, saying the wrong thing, even being said to think the wrong thing — the paranoias are stifling our institutions.

This can make life extremely unpleasant for many ­students, who find ­themselves trapped in a ­hostile environment where a cadre of intolerant bullies can dictate what the rest are or are not allowed to do.

This noisy, ignorant ­minority is even able to ­disrupt crucial exams, as pro-Palestine protesters at Oxford did last week.

But most terrified are the university authorities. Rather than stand up to the woke mob and their sloganeering on climate change, colonial legacy or gender identity ­politics, the administrators are cravenly giving in to any and all demands.

This week, leaked papers from a council meeting at King’s College Cambridge revealed the university plans to bar investment with Barclays and Lloyds banks, over ‘financing of fossil fuels’.

Most of Cambridge’s 31 colleges are believed to bank with either Lloyds or Barclays. The latter has a history with the university going back more than 200 years.

Those links are now threatened because the vice-chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, and her management team are afraid to confront the protesters. Rather than act like adults, they are behaving like a bunch of immature first-year students, and handing responsibility to whoever shouts loudest.

Cambridge is an august seat of learning with a history spanning more than 800 years. If it caves in so easily to infantile pressure politics, no other university, scientific establishment or arts organisation is likely to resist.

The university officials are in thrall to a pressure group, Banking Engagement Forum (BEF). Its chief financial officer, Anthony Odgers, proclaims its goal is, ‘finding financial services products that do not contribute to the expansion of fossil fuels — in particular, new coal and gas-fired plants which lock in demand for decades’.

In fact, Barclays and Lloyds can both claim to pass that test. Barclays said in 2022 it would cease direct funding of new gas and oil projects.

Lloyds is seen as one of the more ‘progressive’ banks in this regard… and last year, Leeds university actually switched to Lloyds, reasoning that it ‘has the lowest fossil fuel investments of any of the major UK banks’.

This hasn’t stopped student activists from staging ­childish protests, including a ‘die-in’ by pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a Barclays branch in January. Chanting slogans including, ‘Israel is a terrorist state,’ they accused the bank of funding arms manufacture for the Israeli army.

One activist said the demo included making a paper chain, ‘with lots of messages to Barclays for all the harm they’re causing’, plus some anti-war origami.

Student pacifism has a long tradition, and these young people have every right to exercise free speech. But it’s ridiculous that Cambridge university authorities are running scared of protesters whose tactics are more suited to a nursery school.

My own experience shows how timid the leadership has become. Seven years ago, when I began to attract criticism for my studies of the British Empire and its ethics, a senior member of staff at Oxford invited me for a chat.

When we met in a cafe, he insisted we sit behind a screen where we wouldn’t be observed together. Though he assured me that the university backed my work and would resist bids by some of my colleagues to have the research project shut down, he was clearly petrified of being seen with me.

Since then, no senior figure in the university has shown any interest in hearing about my experience and what it implies about the threats to free speech, teaching and research in our universities.

My problems have been minor compared to those of some dons, such as Professor Kathleen Stock, who was driven to resign her post at the University of Sussex ­following a sustained ­campaign against her by both students and staff.

Her offence as a philosopher was to hold gender-­critical, feminist views — to insist people with male genitalia are not women, however much they might wish it.

The hounding of isolated academics has consequences far beyond the damage done to individual lives. One cancellation can deter thousands from speaking their minds. They see how Professor Stock has been abandoned and betrayed by her former university and they decide to keep quiet.

Freedom of speech, a ­fundamental of universities until now, has been abandoned with sickening haste.

Last month, I was asked to speak at the Cardiff Academic Freedom Association’s inaugural meeting. The city’s university refused to fund security arrangements, no doubt hoping that this inconvenient offshoot of democracy would wither and die.

The event went ahead after the Free Speech Union paid, but we were forced to move to a different venue. An organiser admitted to me that the lack of support by the university would make him think twice about staging a public meeting again.

All over Britain, small but impassioned groups are being silenced by the same illiberal, anti-democratic trend. The Hay Festival of Literature & Arts was a ­victim this month when ­virtue-signalling celebrities, including comedian Nish Kumar and singer Charlotte Church, urged a boycott.

A Corbynist pressure group called Fossil Free Books attacked a festival sponsor, investment group Baillie Gifford, on the grounds that it holds shares in some oil and gas companies. They also accused it of being complicit in ‘Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide’ in Gaza.

A spokesman for the group said: ‘We do not want our ­literary life to come at the expense of human rights in other countries.’

Organisers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, another beneficiary of Baillie Gifford sponsorship, pointed out that their funding provided free tickets and books for children. ‘Without their contribution, this crucial work simply will not happen,’ they said.

In fact, without generous sponsors, countless small arts and book festivals, science fairs, theatre productions, painting exhibitions and musical events will cease to exist — to the impoverishment of education in Britain.

It is particularly invidious that so many activists waging these facile protests are well-off and highly privileged, as investigations by the Mail have shown. Insulated by family wealth from the damage they create, they pretend to be ‘saving the world’ while ignoring the harm they do to others all around them.

There’s an ethical parallel between a barricade on a motorway by Just Stop Oil, and the blockade of a university end-of-year exam. In both cases, ordinary people are victims of arrogant, self-serving poseurs who don’t care what chaos they inflict, as long as they enjoy a smug feeling of moral superiority.

Where the activists are young, they at least have the excuse of being immature, naive and ignorant. The authorities at Cambridge University have no such defence. They are the adults in the room and should start behaving as such.

• Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is also author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.