Our scribbler reflects on what we can learn about our universities from reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk
Dear Reader, you know that moment? You are pottering round the garden, idly lift a stone, and reveal a hidden world of spiders, grubs and earwigs scuttling for cover?
Swift recalled that moment while reading about the murder in the United States of Charlie Kirk. He had missed the visit of Kirk to Oxford to debate political and race issues at the Oxford Union, a typical engagement in his programme of reasoned engagement with the young.
Now the Oxford Union is not your typical unwashed band of undergraduates shouting slogans and cancelling lesbians, sorry trans-exclusionary radical feminists. It’s not a student union in the conventional sense at all - indeed it's very upmarket. A training ground for politicians (perhaps that’s why the country is in such a mess), white tie debates, keenly contested elections. In short it’s a THING.
There's a picture of Kirk there. He’s face to face with a tramp who has clearly wandered in from The Broad by mistake (although tramps are normally a little better-dressed). So one might think. You can see it here.
Unforts, dear reader, the tramp turns out to be the president-elect of the Oxford Union, who demonstrated his gift for repartee and his intellectual vim by a couple of posts on social media celebrating in no uncertain terms the assassination of his debating opponent.
Let’s not waste any more words on this person. He will not be named here. He is going to be vilified enough. What concerns Swift, dear friends, is the state of British academic life more generally.
There are certain people, Swift finds, who can be reliably used as guidance on any given issue, including this one. Because they are always wrong.
Swift places in this category the former Conservative Rory Stewart, Guardianista supreme Polly Toynbee (please, Sir Keir, can she made a Dame – it just fits), and of course St Gordon of Brown.
Among this illustrious band we must give a place of honour to another former Conservative minister David Willetts, a man so intelligent he has achieved a personal version of the horseshoe theory of politics (the one about the closeness of the extremes). David consistently clever and equally consistently wrong.
Dear readers, are you aware that the British university sector is the envy of the world? David is, because he told us so in the virtual pages of ConHome no less (here).
Now it would be a bold chevalier who crossed a sabre with Two Brains Willetts – his former sobriquet. But Swift’s experience of the university sector is less rosy. Isn’t this the place where free speech and challenging ideas are now discouraged? Where students spend their working lives paying off the debts incurred by taking valueless degrees? Where lazy and incompetent lecturers go on strike for their gold-plated pensions while giving their students the most cursory of tuition? Where above all the Cult of the Goddess Woke is celebrated by the ritual burning of conservative academics, people who think the British Empire was sort of OK, and those evildoers who believe that men can’t be women, not matter how much slap and short skirts they display?
Indeed, where the deliberate murder of a leading Conservative voice can be openly celebrated by a student at one of Britain’s, indeed the world’s, top-level places of learning.
Perhaps the wisdom of Willetts could be applied to this case, or indeed to an equally high-end outfit, the University of Edinburgh. This Caledonian car-crash is devoted tirelessly to trashing its gorgeous intellectual heritage - Hume and Smith being only two examples – by the usual methods: renaming things – Hume has lost his square, another chap (Adam Ferguson) his building – producing reports in how awful everything was in the 18th Century, and offering us such weedy insights as: ‘I think a lot of the report is hard to read, but I have confidence in its accuracy because I trust the experts that have produced it.’
This was from the university’s principal, whom Swift will leave in the decent obscurity of a Guardian article - here, where you can see him doing one of those angry people in local newspapers faces , much to Swift’s amusement.
Readers, it is not hard to read. It’s bleedin’ obvious, but nowadays one has to pretend surprise that not everyone opposed slavery in 1750 and trans rights failed to feature in university curricula.
One wonders if the universities of today are so Blob-tastic that we should just close them down and found others. Swift salutes those who, like Charlie Kirk, go out and argue. Shame so few here are listening.