Today’s student rebels are not as daft as their dons – or us older subversives

As far as outrageous student protests go, taking down a portrait of the Queen from the common room wall is pretty lame.

The now-notorious Oxford iconoclasts, all postgrads apparently, even voted before deciding HM was too colonial for their tastes. From the condemnation that followed, you would have thought they had done something genuinely unacceptable, like confronting the Queen herself during a royal tour of their college.

How different it was in my day, when a student rebellion typically involved pelting tomatoes and bags of flour, occasionally an egg, at statesmen who braved our campus.

One such was the then education minister, Rhodes Boyson – this was in the early years of Thatcher – who was greeted by our welcoming committee according to tradition. Ted Heath turned up too and, like Boyson, didn’t get a chance to speak. He also left with the tell-tale pizza ingredients stuck to his nice suit.

We were rude and petulant, but obviously, we were right about everything, especially spot-on about Ba’athism and Zionism and all the other isms we passed motions on in the students’ union.

In three years of insurrection, countless marches and other assorted antics, I don’t recall getting much press coverage until we excelled ourselves by occupying the Vice Chancellor’s office, and then the local paper sent a reporter.

The Oxford students must be thrilled with the attention they are getting for their cause, with not just the media, but everyone from the Prime Minister to Piers Morgan having their say. At first, I thought this was because they were such an elite cohort, from an institution rated number two in the latest QS world university rankings. They are harder to ignore than we were at our unfashionable (even then) plate glass establishment that has just scraped into the QS league at 439.

But student politics is treated much more seriously now because there is not much to choose between adolescent and mature (in age only) thinking in the context of the current cultural wars. There has undoubtedly been a merging of the undergrad, or postgrad, mindset with donnish groupthink, as recent events have shown.

In my day, we might have been politically naïve and tactically infantile but at least we would grow up, once released into the world. Many of our indulgent tutors were left-wing firebrands, but they were also sane. What do today’s students have to model their behaviour on but dons who are as daft as they are?

In fact, they are dafter. While the Middle Common Room at Magdalen College were deliberating the future of the Queen, their elders were working themselves into a lather over the fate of Cecil Rhodes. The outcome, now well publicised, saw 150 academics refusing to give tutorials to the students of Oriel College until its statue of the controversial imperialist is removed.

The boycott, which comes three weeks after the college’s governing body decided to keep the statue, could be averted if a “sorry” sign was hung around Rhodes’ neck or if he was turned to face the wall, said one of the dons. But, even in the depths of my student sedition, I doubt I could have dreamt up so petty a response to a grievance.

Over at Cambridge, the silliness went all the way to the top when the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stephen Toope, issued a list of “microaggressions” – such as raising an eyebrow, calling a woman a girl, or giving backhanded compliments – that could be reported as inappropriate behaviour. He has since conceded, under pressure from his peers, that this was a mistake, which suggests some wisdom remains in our seats of learning.

But the cancel culture that originated at fresher level, with the no-platforming of lifelong progressives such as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell, is ingrained in the upper echelons of academia nationwide.

At Edinburgh, a senior lecturer in social anthropology has just emerged from two months of hell after a Stasi-esque ostracism by his university. Dr Neil Thin – whose research interests include well-being, happiness, social quality, justice, and conviviality – was suspended following accusations, later found to be groundless, of being a racist and “rape apologist” after he spoke out against racially segregated spaces at the university. He was also cancelled for opposing the renaming of the David Hume Tower (instigated over the Enlightenment philosopher’s record on race).

While a supposedly disgruntled student initiated the complaint, university chiefs, including his own head of department, were too ready to suspect a teacher with nearly 35 years’ service and side with the students. The young and impressionable could be forgiven, within reason, of hysterical outbursts, but those charged with their education should be above the fray. Thin’s refusal to be bullied into silence cost him personally, but he won’t pipe down: “We need to keep challenging our own opinions and other people’s,” he said.

Dinah Rose, QC, president of Magdelen College, takes the same approach. In defending her students’ right to remove the Queen, she nevertheless said she respected the “British values” upheld by the monarch. “Those values include the right to freedom of expression and debate, including the expression of views which many people may find offensive or wrong.”

The message was directed at alumni, but it speaks to the whole university community and workplaces, sports fields, and anywhere else in the grip of Woke, the ism of our age.