An inquest into the death of 20-year-old Alexander Rogers has heard how the Oxford student killed himself after an allegation was made against him.
A female student had expressed “discomfort” about a sexual encounter with him, an inquest into his death was told. She did not express this discontent in the form of a criminal complaint, and Rogers was not being investigated for any crime. Nor was the incident reported to college authorities. His friends are said to have told him he had “messed up” and that they needed space from him.
The third-year studying materials science at Corpus Christi College died in January after leaving two suicide notes – one for his friends expressing remorse, and one for his family expressing his love – and jumping into the Thames. Following the inquest, coroner Nicholas Graham ruled that “in the preceding days Alexander had been ostracised” and “his distress at this led him to form an intention to take his own life”.
In one of the first instances of its kind, Graham wrote in his ruling that although “suicide arises often from a complex interplay of factors”, campus “cancel culture” likely contributed to Rogers’s sense that he didn’t deserve to live.
According to the ruling: “This culture, described as a form of ‘cancel culture’, involved the exclusion of students from social circles based on allegations of misconduct, often without due process or a fair hearing.”
The coroner has since sent a prevention of future death report to the Department for Education, asking ministers “to reflect on the concerns that have arisen” and “take those concerns forward”.
Writing for the Telegraph, Rosa Silverman points out that while ‘no-platforming’ those with views deemed offensive raises its own issues, Rogers’s death highlights a more sinister side of this relatively recent outbreak of ‘righteous’ censorship on campus. She continues:
Where unpalatable views are concerned, there has long been policing by students. The National Union of Students introduced a “No Platform” policy in 1974, in an attempt to block those with racist opinions from expressing them on campuses.
Fifty years on, the ensuing free speech debate continues to rage. But the censoring and ostracising of those at universities judged to have sinned in less well-defined ways, either by expressing “wrong” views, or by behaving with “wrong” conduct, appears to have escalated lately, with students themselves walking a moral tightrope.
“It was a very charged atmosphere, where I had to be incredibly careful with words,” says Alfie, who has now graduated. “The pernicious side of cancel culture was in the everyday. I watched lecturers and supervisors tiptoe around sensitive topics, labouring over their words to ensure they didn’t offend. And it’s so tedious – when you force people to watch their every word, you discourage honest discussion and you push people to the extremes.”
One recent Oxford graduate recalls a culture of what she calls “super-toxic bullying that people could justify.” She says: “Plenty of people had their university experience ruined due to one slip-up. All it took was one allegation and you’d be done for. A loud few people acted as judge, jury and executioner, which set the tone for a lot of the rest of college culture. I think most people hated it, but couldn’t speak up for fear of being cancelled themselves.”
A recent graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, meanwhile talks of a “group-think mentality” in which a “vocal minority paraded themselves as paragons of virtue”.
This was not the case a generation ago, but much has changed since. Social media has brought with it polarised debates and an ever-shifting roster of heroes and villains that has arguably permeated real world student culture.
“That would be my diagnosis,” agrees Jeff McMahan, Emeritus Sekyra and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. “All this ultimately derives from the fact that people started early on in social media to be vituperative and condemnatory because they could either be anonymous or invulnerable, as the people they were attacking were in distant places.
“So I do think social media and the internet are largely responsible for having produced this culture of vituperation.”
Although he describes himself as politically Left-wing, and takes many of the same positions on issues as the students doing the censoring, he diverges from them on one important point: “I don’t think we should treat everyone who disagrees with us as evil.”
Prof McMahan knows what it’s like to fall foul of cancel culture, after all. A critic of Israel, he was asked to withdraw from giving a lecture at the American University of Beirut in 2018 after someone checked his CV and discovered he was an adviser to the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He attended all the same, and was shouted down for 20 minutes.
“They presumed I was a baddie and shouldn’t be allowed to speak,” he says. “It shows it’s everywhere, not just in Europe and the US.”
These stories are troubling, but not surprising.
You only have to glance through the FSU’s case files to see that there’s a real problem with free speech on campus. Of the more than 3,000 cases we’ve taken on since formation in 2020, approximately 500 (16%) involve academics and students whose speech rights have been curtailed in some way.
Please do get in touch with our case team if you’ve suffered detriment for expressing your lawful views on campus, or if the fear of detriment causes you to self-censor. We want to hear about it – and we may be able to help.
