Roger Mosey, the outgoing Master of Selwyn College, has warned that Cambridge University is suffering from a culture of “ideological conformity”, with growing numbers of academics afraid to express views that depart from progressive orthodoxy.
Writing for The Telegraph ahead of his retirement this September, Mosey – a former Editorial Director at the BBC – describes his 12-year tenure as “a chilling decade on the front line of the University’s culture wars”. While Cambridge continues to produce “astonishing, groundbreaking research”, he writes, it has also become a place where “many of us were wary in university meetings about what we said and to whom”, and where “the views of activists on a variety of topics” have acquired disproportionate influence. “The response – insisting on ideological conformity – had a polarising effect,” he argues, creating a binary in which academics were often made to feel they had to choose between being “pro‑minority or pro‑free speech”.
In one of the clearest signs of how quickly university culture had shifted, Mosey describes the rapid entrenchment of what he calls a “new gender orthodoxy”, grounded in the principle of self‑identification rather than biological sex. “Only three years [after 2016],” he writes, “a revolution had taken place.” At Cambridge, it became common for students to attend lectures with slogans on their laptops declaring “trans women are real women”.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that: students are free to express their views. But, as Mosey suggests, it was the surrounding power asymmetry that proved chilling; the sense that this position was institutionally affirmed, while disagreement was professionally dangerous. One female professor recalled thinking, on seeing a male student displaying such a slogan, “Imagine if I’d displayed a sticker saying the opposite. Would I lose my job? I felt uncomfortable about a man telling me what a woman is, even though as a mother I assumed I might know.”
A distinguished female scientist pointed instead to what was left unsaid. “The scientific evidence is that biological sex is immutable, and that is scientific orthodoxy,” she told Mosey. “But there was a time when I just didn’t feel that I could say that.”
In a 2022 webinar with Cambridge philosopher and free speech campaigner Arif Ahmed, Mosey recalls, several topics were raised as having become increasingly difficult to discuss in universities, including “the political aims of Black Lives Matter”, “the so-called decolonisation of the syllabus”, and criticism of Israeli state actions. A student Mosey knew personally reported “hostility from an influential senior figure” after voicing pro‑Brexit views to a member of staff “who would have determined his academic future and its funding”.
Cambridge has largely avoided the high‑profile controversies seen at other institutions, such as the harassment of Professor Kathleen Stock at Sussex or the treatment of gender‑critical scholars at the Open University. But the “silent majority” of academics, Mosey suggests, have nonetheless internalised the risks of dissent.
One revealing moment came in 2020, when Cambridge’s University Council – the university’s executive and policy-making body – proposed a revised free speech policy, requiring staff, students and visiting speakers to “respect the diverse identities of others”.
The proposals were, in the words of one academic group, “no doubt meant well”. But critics, including the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms, warned that “respect” was a term easily weaponised to discipline staff for nothing more than “mockery of ideas and individuals with which we disagree”. Professor Ross Anderson argued it would “undermine the freedom we have had for many centuries” and invite interference by “HR departments… with no understanding” of academic norms.
Arif Ahmed, then a philosophy lecturer at Gonville and Caius, added: “The problem with requiring ‘respect’ of all opinions and ‘identities’ is that ‘respect’ is vague, subjective and restrictive.” He asked whether endorsing thinkers such as David Hume, who wrote scathingly about Christianity, could be deemed disrespectful under the proposed rules, and if so, “who gets to decide?”
A group of dons forced a ballot of the Regent House, Cambridge’s governing body of academics and senior staff, to amend the policy. Their changes – replacing “respect” with “tolerate” – were adopted by a landslide, with 86.9 per cent in favour. Whereas “respect” implies a duty of affirmation, “tolerance” preserves the right to challenge, satirise and critique ideas without mandating deference.
While the outcome was encouraging, Mosey notes that it also revealed something more troubling: a deep reluctance among academics to be seen defending free speech in public. “This was in a secret ballot,” he writes. “[Ahmed] had much more difficulty getting colleagues to put their heads above the parapet to get the referendum launched in the first place.”
Mosey closes on a cautiously optimistic note, pointing to signs of improvement in Cambridge’s intellectual climate – including a renewed institutional commitment to robust dialogue and the arrival of new leadership, such as the Vice‑Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice. But his parting message is less a grim verdict than a timely wake‑up call to those who would sacrifice intellectual risk for psychological safety. “The biggest lesson from more than a decade in Cambridge,” he concludes, “is about the peril of trying to impose conformity on a university whose driving force should be academic freedom.”
You can read Roger’s article here.
