Following the death of Alexander Rogers, an Oxford student who took his life after being ostracised by fellow undergraduates, two students writing in the Sunday Times say they live in fear of being publicly shamed on social media by their vicious, virtue-signalling peers.
“I didn’t know Alexander Rogers personally,” writes the first student, “but Oxford is a small city when it wants to be. He was at another college. My friend did know him and I remember her phoning me in tears. Through muffled sobs, she said that he had died.
“An inquest ruled that Alexander was the victim of ‘pervasive cancel culture’. He was a young and vibrant man at an amazing university. He was involved in college life, treasurer of the Junior Common Room, a member of the boat club. He had everything ahead of him. For it all to turn in an instant is tragic and unforgivable.
“I wish deeply that being cancelled on campus was rare. But I know more people than I can count who have been ostracised. It’s something that students now have to learn to navigate.
“I witnessed cancel culture in my first term at Oxford.
“Someone in my year was accused of racism in the week before the winter holiday. The allegation was vague and unsubstantiated and, as it turned out, untrue.
“The accuser created a group chat with most of our year on Instagram. Then they said that if we didn’t condemn them, we were just as bad. If we were friends with them, we were racist too. The messages of ‘support against racism’ pinged on my phone throughout the night.
“Over that holiday I went for a drink with the cancelled person to see how they were.
“They were on the verge of dropping out. It had ruined their life. No one was talking to them. People they had considered friends were icy.
“At one point they asked me about someone in our year.
“‘You’d probably know better than me,’ I said, but it turned out I was the only person who had reached out.”
The second undergraduate student writes: “In my second year, I was on a committee organising a sports club dinner when it was suggested in a Facebook group chat that we have a tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony (a former student writes). Biggest boozer. Worst chat. Strongest swing. You get the idea.
“Person A suggested that ‘best bum’ should be one of the categories, and five minutes later Person B sent a long, carefully structured reply explaining that the idea was sexist and objectifying, and made them uncomfortable. Person B could have said gently that Person A’s idea wasn’t their finest. Instead, Person B sharpened their pitchfork in a public, albeit digital, arena. A swarm of angry reacts, sad reacts and thumbs-downs ensued, even from quiet people who would never call out anything offline. When the event arrived, Person A sat sadly in the corner, ignored by all but a few of the dinner guests.
“Not long later, during a drunken game of charades, a few boys imitated the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot by stretching their caucasian eyes with a fingertip at each temple. They quickly became the talk of the college, and many of their former friends chose never to speak to them again.
“And though there’s no doubt those boys were wrong to imitate him that way, what struck me was the impossibility of forgiveness or reconciliation.
“Doing the wrong thing is often how we learn to do the right thing.
“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that as a student there I lived in fear of being cancelled. We all did. It was a subtle, low-level fear, but it was constant.”
Worth reading in full.
Their stories are shocking, but not surprising. You only have to glance through the FSU’s case files to see that there’s a problem with free speech on campus.
Of the more than 3,000 cases we’ve taken on since we formed 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.
If Britain’s universities are to preserve their world class reputation, we need to urgently restore the tradition of free inquiry and open debate, with students and academics able to speak their minds without fear of punishment.
