Fears about cancel culture on campus will be investigated by the government following the suicide of a student last year.
The news comes in a letter from the Department for Education (DfE) to the coroner who held the inquest into the death of Alexander Rogers, a third-year undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Nicholas Graham, the coroner for Oxfordshire, concluded that the 20-year-old materials science student had taken his own life. He had been ostracised after a woman expressed discomfort about their sexual encounter and friends said they needed space from him. This, the coroner said, is likely to have influenced the isolation he felt.
Mr Graham also said that a serious incident review commissioned by Corpus Christ had highlighted a “concerning culture of social ostracism”.
“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 evidence… was that students could rush to judgment without knowledge of all the facts, could shun those accused, and [a] ‘pile on’ might occur where a group would form a negative view about another individual.”
Following a request by Mr Rogers’s family, the coroner said that he would write to the DfE to address the prevalence of cancel culture in university settings. He voiced his concerns that exclusionary behaviour was becoming commonplace and that students were self-policing as a body over views and behaviour that caused disapproval from peers.
In its response, the DfE has now said it will “work with experts and leading university student welfare officials and students to convene a roundtable in early 2025 exploring the issues around social ostracism and lack of trust in formal processes in more depth”.
It added: “This will build on work being led by the University of Oxford to establish a working group on social ostracism and open discussions around how students can ‘disagree well’ and engage with ‘constructive dialogue’.”
At first sight, Alexander’s story mightn’t seem to be ‘about’ free speech in the conventional sense. The campus mob didn’t descend with freshly sharpened pitchforks over something controversial that he’d said. But the ostracism he suffered speaks to a deeper – and, we would suggest, closely linked – crisis on university campuses: a crisis where disagreement is no longer an opportunity for dialogue and negotiation, but instead leads to censure.
It’s a reminder that the battle for free speech isn’t just about policy or law, but about fostering a culture where difference is met with debate, not exclusion.
