The master who gave that speech was one of the world’s greatest experts in geo-engineering. His predecessors were similarly renowned in their scholarly fields. He had taken over from David Crighton, an applied mathematician who made important contributions to the study of aeroacoustics. His immediate predecessor was Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist of global fame.

These facts came to mind when I read that the current master of Jesus, Sonita Alleyne, had signed the Good Law Project petition claiming that criticism of alleged plagiarist and serial fantasist Jason Arday was nothing more than one part of a racist campaign to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence”.

Arday had been made a fellow of Jesus College when appointed Professor of the Sociology of Education at the Education Faculty. If the allegations of malpractice could be batted aside by the standard ritual accusations of bigotry, then clearly the reputation of the college that enthusiastically offered him a fellowship, and its master, would be protected. Whether this was Alleyne’s motivation, or she genuinely believed that Arday was a victim of racist abuse — rather than, say, an ethically challenged connoisseur of Australian soap operas with all the academic heft of a Sun showbiz editor but without their basic literacy — I cannot say for sure. One can draw one’s own conclusions.

Initially, my reaction was simple ire at Alleyne’s total indifference to the extensive evidence of his plagiarism. I had been an undergraduate at Jesus, then an MPhil and PhD student there. I remembered well, as a history postgraduate, being given very stern guidance about how serious plagiarism was, and how negligence or ignorance of citation practices was no excuse. The punishment, it was implied, would be harsh and definitive.

I also remembered that I had known genuine academic wunderkinds, students who had got double firsts, who had not even managed to get funding for a PhD at Cambridge, let alone a college fellowship at Jesus. The appointment of a man who was unable to even punctuate the title of his PhD thesis correctly, and conducted junk “autoethnographic” research, seemed a grave insult to those disappointed friends, not to mention the standards the master during my time had clearly taken so seriously. To accuse anyone who objected to this of “racism” made me feel sick.

Sick, but not surprised. I soon remembered that, following Alleyne’s appointment in 2019, I had wondered what the academic expertise of my alma mater’s new head would be. Quantum dynamics? Medieval Latin poetry? Not quite. She was, in fact, not an academic at all, but a co-founder of a music production company who had become a trustee of many artsy charities and a BBC trust member. She had a degree from Cambridge, but that was it academically.

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This seemed, and still seems, bizarre to me. Imagine a media corporation deciding that the natural new appointment for its board was a professor of Greek philology. Obviously, this would never happen. So why did anyone think that someone with close to zero experience of scholarship, university teaching or indeed anything much relevant to academic life should become the master of a venerable Cambridge College? The cynic in me says that the rising tide of identity politics, which appears to have afflicted Jesus worse than most Oxbridge colleges, led to the conclusion that Nothing Else Would Do except the appointment of a black woman. Even this seems hard to understand, given that there are many black women with distinguished academic records who would have been superior choices.

Whether Alleyne’s appointment was gesture politics or not, the college is certainly no stranger to such ethical self-indulgence. It conducted a quixotic, expensive and unsuccessful attempt to remove a chapel memorial to Tobias Rustat, one of its most munificent historical benefactors, due to his investments in the African slave trade. The campaign, spearheaded by Alleyne, failed when a church consistory court decided against the college, giving her the near-unique distinction of failing to convince the modern Church of England to abase itself over the historical slave trade.

The campaign was whipped up in an atmosphere of exaggeration and moral self-flagellation over historical wrongs, driven by a modish obsession with “decolonization”. The point, of course, is that removing a memorial is nice and symbolic and crucially cost free — unlike, for instance, refusing to accept or disperse the “tainted” money that is still paid out from Rustat’s bequest to fund scholarships and grants. This, of course, Jesus have failed to do.

And yet for all its concern with the abuses of 350 years ago, when it comes to contemporary human rights violations Jesus has been far more relaxed. One of its longest standing fellows is Peter Nolan, a well-known apologist for the Chinese Communist Party and its authoritarian dictatorship. Nolan founded and ran Jesus’ China Center for years and cautioned against any debate on the persecution of the Uyghurs. The fact that Nolan and Jesus College have accepted various sinecures, appointments and payments from the Chinese government or government-aligned sources over the years presumably is just a coincidence.

There was, eventually, a review of the college’s cozy relationship with China, but little of the strident moralizing that came so easily when discussing what Rustat did 350 years ago. It seems that the college takes a moral absolutist attitude through time, but a very relativist one through space: Rustat is evil, but the current Chinese government must be respectfully engaged with — no matter how many people it tortures or locks up or puts in labor camps.

In this context, appointing Arday must have seemed like a similar bit of cost-free symbolism, particularly in a university where there are many figures like Alleyne. Many college heads are now hacks, media luvvies, corporate consultants and washed-up state administrators. Such people tend to have a far weaker investment in the standards that have historically made Cambridge distinctive: its non-negotiable commitment to academic standards; its rigorous system of small-group teaching; its decentralized nature. They have ended Cambridge’s relative isolation from the trends that have long beset much of the rest of higher education, not least rampant commercialization and modish progressivism. They find willing allies among even genuine academics whose politics — which usually runs the gamut between post-colonial hard Left and soft-Left liberalism — too often trump their commitment to academic standards.

This has gone hand in hand with the rising power of the centralized apparatus of the university itself, and the ballooning class of managers it employs. The UAS — the university’s central administrative body — has seen its numbers rise by 133% since 2010. Meanwhile, short-term and fixed-term contracts have tended to make academics less secure in their tenure and less likely to see themselves as permanent and secure guardians of the university, instead making them beholden to the whims of a managerial class.

Those who stand up to the hectoring of their administrative overlords face bullying and punishment, as yesterday’s employment tribunal judgment against the university and its vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice demonstrated. Wyn Evans, a professor of astrophysics, accused the university of misogynistic bullying and retaliating against whistleblowers. The tribunal found that “there was a shared desire to close down whistleblowing complaints which might be damaging to Cambridge University and the Institute of Astronomy”.

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In short, Cambridge has become more like most other universities. The colleges, the independence and sheer variety of which provided some protection against top-down diktat from a centralized bureaucracy, are gradually losing their power. Insofar as they retain it, they are being colonized by those doyennes of the progressive professional-managerial-corporate classes who have wrecked most of our other institutions.

All the while, masterships of colleges are increasingly seen as cozy berths for undistinguished, symbolically useful or failed members of the media-civil service-charity nexus that constitutes the progressive wing of the establishment — or else a respectable backwater for corporate managers. The university chases the high fees brought in by foreign students and the high-profile grants awarded by the research councils and makes its senior appointments accordingly, often doling out professorships to “safe” second raters rather than genuinely world-class talents.

There is some room for hope. Few faculties are as compromised as Education: most still contain many academics who remain committed to the highest academic standards. The college system still exists, and there is strong resistance in some quarters to the new fads. Trinity College recently bucked the trend of appointing luvvies or hacks to masterships, instead appointing a proper botany scholar as its new master. But the vision of a self-governing community of autonomous scholars pursuing the very highest standards of scholarly endeavor, the vision of Jesus masters past, has long since been compromised. Arday is just one symbol of that, and I doubt he will be the last. The reckoning for Cambridge’s recent follies is only just beginning.

But to my surprise we won, and by a considerable majority, in a packed chamber. Not due to my halting efforts, but rather to a brilliant speech by Trevor Phillips, who evidently touched both the hearts and the minds of the large and diverse audience. He was able to draw on his family’s opposition to colonial rule in British Guiana, and yet also on his father’s patriotic service in the Second World War and his own respect for many of our country’s achievements today.

Not all students fit the “woke” stereotype that I was too ready to ascribe to them, then. Many of those present, including several who spoke, were not British; the University is today a highly international institution. And yet they recognised that our nation can and should inspire pride and gratitude.

Trevor urged the audience not to emulate their Oxford predecessors and encourage the enemies of democracy and freedom by publicly rubbishing our common culture; and he politely but firmly rebuked a young woman who proclaimed from the floor that the current Tory government was little better than a populist dictatorship. Though he had never been and would never be a Tory, he said, the present government included more people from ethnic minorities in senior positions than all the governments in our history combined, and more than any government in Europe today.

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This is what our “history wars” are really about. Not analysing and understanding the past, but using historical claims to support negative assertions about the present. Despite the majority of students who voted for us that evening, I was alarmed at some of the opinions that were presented as incontrovertible fact. Two that remain in my mind are that our history had been “a long bloodbath”, and that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine if 1943.

I hope these were not History students, who should have known that the Bengal famine is a complex and contested episode, and our domestic history, compared with most countries’, has been relatively peaceful and bloodless. I hope that History students might also have recalled the conclusion of that deeply anti-colonialist former imperial policeman, George Orwell, that the British Empire had been “peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been [with] fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state”.

Where do (some) Cambridge students get the idea of our history as a “bloodbath”? Much recent popular writing on the empire — for example John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried — has emphasised its violence practically to the exclusion of all else. But for that perspective to seem plausible, it is necessary to avoid all comparisons with what existed before colonial rule, and with what, in some countries, came after it. It is necessary to draw a veil over pre-colonial societies, and imagine them uncritically either as “noble savages” living in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable Eden, or as viable modernising states. It is even more important to avert one’s gaze from post-colonial failures and tyrannies.

Instead, one has to accept the accounts of axe-grinding nationalist politicians, such as the Indian polemicist Shashi Tharoor, who in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, uses the British Raj as a scapegoat for the failings of modern Indian governments. Or one has to play up to the politics of victimhood by making slavery the hallmark of the Empire — even though the Empire was the major force that suppressed global slavery during a century and a half of effort.

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The “woke” fervour that has recently disturbed the cloistered calm of Cambridge is based on bad history, then. The kind one would expect of a doctrinaire first-year undergraduate, perhaps. And yet, as my pleasant and interesting evening at the Cambridge Union suggested, I do not believe that it comes primarily from the majority of students. Some of it may come from PhD students and academics in subjects such as “postcolonial literature”, for whom wokeness is practically a requirement of the job. But although they managed to bully one young academic out of his college fellowship after accusing his research of being “racist”, generally they are too few and intellectually too marginal to have an impact on their own.

The real problem comes from the University and College administrations. It is they who are encouraging, and even requiring, gestures towards “decolonisation” and the sort of anonymous denunciation that masquerades under the once innocent slogan of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”. It was a Pro-Vice Chancellor who pushed a now notorious anti-racist strategy that encouraged secret complaints about “microaggressions”, and which had to be withdrawn in the face of strong internal and external criticism. It is certain Colleges, notoriously Downing, that are now attempting to adopt an almost identical policy at the lower level. It was the University’s central authorities who dragged their heels over guaranteeing free speech, until forced to change direction by a vote of the academic rank-and-file in the Regent House. And it was the Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, who in 2019 set up an enquiry into the University’s links with slavery, “amid a wider reflection taking place in the United States and Britain on the links between universities and slavery”.

Herein lies a clue as to what is really going on here. The university is in competition, especially with American universities, and, pretty obviously, wokeness is part of a marketing strategy. University managers are increasingly operating like any other multinational corporation. All have to “curate” their public image, and their gestures carry no more intellectual or moral weight than those of Nike or Ben and Jerry.

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In defence of defending empire

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My own College, St John’s, has been spared the temptation of progressive histrionics: luckily, our connection with slavery is that the two greatest English abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, were undergraduates, as were Lord Castlereagh (who secured the first international anti-slave-trade commitment in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna) and Lord Palmerston (who in 1850 sent the proverbial gunboats to Brazil to stop the largest remaining trans-Atlantic trade). It seems that the father of an 18th-century student owned slaves, but fortunately the College got none of his money.

Not so fortunate has been Jesus College, whose contortions have epitomised the worst hypocrisies of “woke”. Their embarrassing record of lucrative sycophancy towards the Chinese regime means that discussion of human rights has been regarded as “unhelpful”, and suppressed, in case the College were “perceived as being a campaigning college for freedom for Hong Kong [or] freedom for the Uighurs”. But if they show limited concern for genocide in the 21st century, they are very sensitive indeed to an investment in the slave trade by their great benefactor Tobias Rustat in the 17th. Him they are busy cancelling, to the extent of trying to remove his memorial from the College chapel. Meanwhile, the college’s China Centre, which “aims to deepen mutual understanding between China and the West by ‘using the past to serve the present’”, blithely continues.

Jesus College has also just ostentatiously returned to Nigeria a “Benin Bronze”, seized during a British punitive expedition against the slave-owning Kingdom of Benin in 1897, following the slaughter of a diplomatic mission. Of course, the college is free to donate its property as it wishes, and it could have decided, unobtrusively, that a brass cockerel from Nigeria would be more appreciated in its ancestral homeland than merely by being placed on a dinner table in Cambridge during feasts.

But instead, the college staged a fulsome ceremony, in which the statuette was handed to a descendent of the Obas of Benin, the slavers from whom it was confiscated. The British who freed the Oba’s slaves were described by the Master as having committed “a wrong that is so egregious”. Slaving by Africans, it would seem, is not worth a mention. At Jesus College, the Master added, “we teach, we educate.” It is hardly surprising if Cambridge students thereby acquire strange notions of history.