The James Orr inquisition shames Cambridge

Cancel culture is far from dead in British universities. Last Friday, two students from the ‘Fire James Orr Campaign’ barged into the right-wing academic’s class at Cambridge, disrupted his lecture and berated him for speech crimes. They demanded that the university cancel him over his former position as head of policy at Reform UK. An acolyte named Samantha Asumadu retweeted the footage in triumph, apparently believing that this exercise in heroic virtue would pressure the administration to fire him.

The students are under the illusion that disrupting a lecture is ‘practising my free speech’. They seem ignorant of the fact that time, place and manner restrictions are important for protecting others’ free speech. They are blissfully unaware of how the heckler’s veto they are trying to exercise is itself a form of censorship. The fact that the students could make such a schoolboy error shows how poorly today’s young people have been educated in the fundamentals of civil liberties.

These Cambridge social-justice warriors were engaging in what Jürgen Habermas and his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno derided as ‘left fascism’ as far back as 1967. Adorno, whose lectures had been repeatedly shut down by student radicals, blasted their replacing of civil dialogue and intellectual debate with emotional aggression, physical coercion and censorship. It reminded him of the tactics of the fascist brownshirts he had witnessed before the Second World War.

At Cambridge on Friday, the wannabe red guards read out their charges with gusto, invoking their monocultural progressive mob of equally intolerant wokescolds:

‘James Orr, you are responsible for the rise of hatred in this country. Transphobia, sexism and racism in this country is due to you as head of policy for Reform UK. Don’t take it from me as an undergraduate. Take it from the lecturers, the supervisors, and the postgrads who condemn what you do. You bring your far-right ideology into this classroom and preach it to the undergrads.’

Students have changed little since the height of the Great Awokening in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Orr’s lead inquisitor indulged in guilt-by-association, citing the academic’s previous role with Palantir and his current position at Reform as proof that he was unfit to teach at Cambridge. The students further beclowned themselves by charging Orr with the ‘social lynching’ of Jason Arday, the former Cambridge academic who, having been exposed as a serious plagiarist and fabulist, was found dead in his London home in August. In truth, this tragic figure was set up for a fall by one ‘progressive’ institution after another, all of which combined to elevate him in the public eye purely on the basis of his race. This ecosystem brushed aside those who raised concerns about Arday, sometimes issuing legal threats, until fellow academic Nathan Cofnas pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

Instead of watching over Arday round the clock at his moment of crisis, his institutional defenders were far more interested in attacking the media, which is naturally drawn to stories of outlandish and prominent public figures at institutions like Cambridge.

Rather than investigate why the university hired such an unqualified individual, Cambridge has succumbed to the internal activism of its progressive bubble. Its initial investigation will focus not on how Arday was hired, but rather on the university’s employee-support mechanisms and its public-relations response to the media. As a result, the Committee for Academic Freedom, a body of British academics concerned with truth, standards and freedom, has initiated its own independent investigation of Cambridge’s hiring of Arday.

New shiny totems have arisen to attract radical worship in recent years. In place of defund the police or #MeToo we get Gaza. Instead of George Floyd we have the latest race icon, Jason Arday.

The implications are serious for Cambridge and for academia. The students want ‘national conservatives’ like Orr out. This attempt would seek to drive Orr, the only conservative public figure of note on the university’s current faculty, and only Reform-aligned scholar, out of what is increasingly a consecrated, taxpayer-supported, ‘progressive’ space. Across Britain, left-wing academics in the social sciences outnumber those on the right six to one, with only one in five Brexit-supporting academics willing to tell their views to a colleague. In elite universities like Cambridge, the situation approaches the monocultural extreme seen at similarly placed US universities like Harvard.

The attack on Orr is all the more galling because universities desperately need to be hearing the voices of those who represent at least half the country. Universities are in a crisis caused by the decline of conservative, classical liberal and gender-critical voices in the professoriate, who have been chased away through social sanctions or active persecution and punishment. In the US, this has tanked universities’ public legitimacy, setting the stage for a crackdown by the Trump administration. Yet universities cannot reform themselves or stand up to the crybullies.

At heart lies the tension between what Jonathan Haidt terms the ‘Social Justice University’, of which Cambridge is an exemplar, and the traditional truth-based university which they pay lip service to. As with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), those who elevate woke – the sanctification of race, gender and sexual orientation – as the paramount values of the university still insist on wearing a skinsuit made of the carcass of the values of the past, such as truth and academic freedom.

Sadly, nothing will change in British academia until the sector is held to account for its brazen political biases.