For the past 12 years, Roger Mosey has served as master of Selwyn College, Cambridge. In a recently published essay, he reflects on how the culture around free speech and debate has evolved throughout one the more tumultuous decades in the modern history of higher education.
Assuming the role of master at Selwyn in 2013, Mosey has had a front row seat to the change in university culture. His essay, published in the Telegraph, describes how the first sign that “the times were changing” came in 2016 during the 40th anniversary of the admission of female students to the College.
An invite had gone out for the women of the College to gather for a group photo, after which male members could also join the celebration for refreshments. However, one student wrote to the vice-master of Selwyn, reprimanding the College for not providing any information for those “who were non-binary or those who identified as a different gender”. As Mosey writes, back then he “was not even sure what non-binary meant” and it had certainly “never been raised at any college meeting”. Of course, anyone in higher education would soon become all too familiar with this and many other new orthodoxies.
Flash forward to 2019, and the entire university culture had transformed in remarkable ways. Mosey describes how a new understanding of gender, “based on self-identification rather than biological sex”, had swept across the entire higher education sector. Students now proudly brandished slogans on their laptops, proclaiming “trans women are real women”, and even established academics began to worry about losing their jobs if they contradicted this and several other ideas. It was, according to Mosey, as if “a revolution had taken place”.
The state of academic debate continued to deteriorate as campuses across the western world approached what some commentators have called “Peak Woke”. Mosey recalls a “distinguished female scientist” confessing that “self-censorship” had become necessary to maintain a career in academia. Before long, the topics on which “public debate in universities had become difficult, if not impossible” expanded to include “the political aims of Black Lives Matter or the so-called decolonisation of the syllabus, criticism of either Israeli settlements or the use of force against Palestinians, and admitting support for Brexit”.
As master of Selwyn College, Mosey spoke to several academics who described their experience of the past few years with words like “afraid”, “frightened” and “isolated”. That the changing culture posed a significant threat to freedom of speech became apparent to Mosey “when students began claiming that ‘words are violence’, as if disagreement were equivalent to a physical attack”.
Mosey goes on to criticise the University of Cambridge for succumbing to the pressure, and agreeing to “overhaul their complaints procedures in response to pressure from activists who felt they were too weak”. This led to some (thankfully) short-lived guidance from a previous management team that the “correct response to a microaggression – a generally unintended verbal infelicity – was to dial 999 and ask for the police”.
Mosey’s essay goes on to describe an attempt by the central administration to create a complaint system that would allow students or even members of the public to file anonymous complaints against named academics. One shudders to think of the countless disciplinary investigations such a system might have created. Luckily, even the administrators at Cambridge realised what a bad initiative this was and scrapped it before it ever saw the light of day.
There were committees insisting on the need to consider the “intersectionality” of even the most insignificant decisions. Students were reprimanded for voicing support for mainstream positions, such Brexit. Online harassment and attempted cancellations became commonplace for some of the academics who spoke out against the prevailing orthodoxies.
But according to Mosey, the overarching theme of this period was that of the “silent majority”. “It’s not just a supposition that the protestors were in a minority”, writes Mosey, citing a 2020 secret ballot amongst Cambridge academics that showed a clear majority (86.9 per cent) in favour of tolerating different views. This brings up the question of why the majority was so silent for so long.
As Mosey sees it, silence was an understandable reaction to the perceived threat of cancellation. But the threat of public shaming, disciplinary investigations and even potential dismissals did not deter everyone from speaking out and defending academic freedom. Indeed, CAF has often highlighted the names of people who, willingly or otherwise, found themselves the centre of these debates. Often, these academics paid a hefty price and they would have benefited from the support of their colleagues.
Reading Mosey’s essay, one wonders why he did not write it sooner. He claims that his “views on freedom of speech were well known, and they were never challenged by colleagues on the governing body”. Still, Mosey admits that “many of us were wary in university meetings about what we said and to whom”.
This echoes a recent interview with the outgoing master of Pembroke College, and newly elected chancellor of Cambridge, Chris Smith. Following the denunciation of Helen Joyce by the master of Gonville and Caius College, Chris claims to have told the fellows at Pembroke that had the event been held at their college, he would have encouraged students to participate. Yet at the time, this sentiment was kept behind closed doors.
Even if Mosey and Smith helped inoculate their own colleges against the epidemic of intolerance, the rest of the higher education sector would surely have benefited from a more outspoken defence of free speech from people in such prestigious positions.
At one point in his essay, Mosey wonders how institutions of higher education “somehow […] allowed the views of activists on a variety of topics to get a grip across the university”. The explanation is almost certainly to be found in the lack of a concerted and consistent opposition to these activist efforts. Of course, even as master of a Cambridge college, Mosey could not single-handedly have reversed the cultural tide washing over academia, and in all fairness, he does have a better record on the free speech than many of his Oxbridge counterparts, but even so, one cannot help but think that his voice would have had much more impact if he had used it sooner.
Mosey ends his essay by concluding that the biggest lesson from his time at Cambridge “is about the peril of trying to impose conformity on a university whose driving force should be academic freedom”. This is indeed a valuable lesson, but it should not have taken a decade of censorious lunacy to learn.