Public confidence in our political leadership is at a perilously low ebb. So how we choose, prepare and train the next generation of political leaders is of critical importance.
If the Boomers have failed, Gen X has been a disappointment and the millennials are missing in action, then the composition of our future elites matters.
One of the most effective nurseries of political talent has always been the Oxford Union. It might be a playground parliament, but it prepared statesmen and women from William Gladstone to Roy Jenkins and Michael Heseltine to Benazir Bhutto for power.
In my own time there during the 1980s I saw a succession of future leaders cut their teeth, from Simon Stevens (lately chief executive of the NHS), to future Cabinet ministers including our own Boris Johnson. The Union was a student preparation for a life of future service.
Which is why the controversy surrounding the fate of the Union’s recently elected President George Abaraonye matters. He was deposed this week in a vote of no-confidence, but only because the Union’s own elder statesmen and women stepped in. Worryingly, he was supported throughout by hundreds of students, despite the fact that he has displayed the kind of behaviour that goes well beyond undergraduate immaturity and confirms the depth and strength of the destructive currents sweeping through our elite institutions.
Mr Abaraonye faced his vote of confidence after revelations in the Daily Mail not just of his disdain for the views of others but his delight in murder.
He had debated against the American conservative influencer Charlie Kirk at the Oxford Union last year, and by all accounts had been bested in argument.
Instead of reflecting on what he might learn, he instead reacted to Kirk’s assassination last month with a chilling, ideologically contorted expression of glee. ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool,’ he posted – short for laughing out loud.
This was not an aberration. He has also accused the late Queen of ‘genocide’, proclaimed that he wouldn’t frequent ‘white spaces’ and was recorded saying he felt ‘hate’ for the Union’s traditions.
Yet Oxford students in their hundreds thought someone who gloried in blood should be their champion. It tells us much about what is happening on our campuses today. But, however shocking Mr Abaraonye’s views may be, they should perhaps not surprise us. Because the problems of our elite institutions, like Oxford, go much further than just nihilistic student activism.
The rot goes to the top. The culture which enables and encourages the George Abaraonyes of our time is the creation of the academics and administrators who are in charge of higher education.
Earlier this month, Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracy, delivered her annual Oration, a report card on the university’s health. It was a series of genuflections before every progressive god the country’s Left-wing establishment cherishes. Net zero zealotry, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology, agonising over mental health insecurities, celebrating colleges for their ‘Sanctuary’ status as magnets for refugees – no woke box went unticked.
Professor Tracy celebrated the fact that Oxford students now have to go through an ‘induction’ programme to better understand DEI before they are able to exercise their right to ‘free speech’ – in other words, taught what they are allowed to think or say before opening their minds, or mouths, to others. This exercise in policing thought and language runs directly counter to the spirit of an institution dedicated to academic freedom.
Professor Tracy’s own language is hardly that of a spirited free-thinker, either. Her address, studded with phrases such as ‘joining the innovation ecosystem party’ and ‘government-approved access and participation plan around on-course study skills’ is a pitiable exercise in dragooning lifeless jargon into the service of thoughtless fads.
While Professor Tracy deploys the language of Shakespeare and Dickens with the finesse of a toddler slamming Duplo bricks together, the academic life of the university, like other once-great institutions, suffers.
Oxford is spending £3.3 million ‘decolonising’ its curriculum – reshaping intellectual inquiry to fit a Left-wing prescription. College libraries are being ‘decolonised’ to remove any ‘micro-aggressions’ sensitive undergraduates might come across. Academics are cancelled because they affirm the scientific truth that there are only two genders fixed at birth.
As this ideological intolerance advances, standards slip, with entry requirements relaxed for students from favoured backgrounds and examination standards lowered for specific groups. Mr Abaraonye, for example, achieved a mere ABB at A-level – remember that a significant proportion of A-levels now achieve A* grades.
Increasingly, the incentive – both at Oxford and other top academic institutions – is to claim incapacity rather than celebrate excellence, to ask for special treatment, not strive for a glittering prize. Students who claim to be living with a disability enjoy favourable academic and exam treatment across higher education institutions – so it is little surprise, but still shocking, that no fewer than a fifth of students arriving at Oxford are now registered disabled.
In an environment where the adults who lead are ashamed of our history, twist the curriculum to fit Marxist theory, talk in impenetrable jargon, put feelings ahead of facts, lower standards to fit fashions and fail to defend truth-tellers, is it any surprise that students like George Abaraonye feel emboldened to act as they do?
And as they look out from their honeyed quadrangles to so many of our institutions, the students of today see the same tendencies at work. The Bank of England advertises an intern scheme open only to black or mixed-race applicants. The judge-led Sentencing Council wanted a two-tier justice scheme with more lenient treatment for specific minorities.
Museums and art galleries strive to outdo each other in apologising for the past they should be celebrating. The university’s own glamorous alumni such as Emma Watson deny gender reality and look for applause from woke’s loudest advocates.
The eminence of our finest universities and institutions has rested on their commitment to open inquiry, free debate, the search for truth, respect for the achievements of Western civilisation and immunity from ideological faddism. Now, those traditions are everywhere crumbling, and with them our defence against ignorance, decadence and prejudice.
Which is why Oxford undergraduates such as George Abaraonye feel they can celebrate the deaths of political opponents and why another Oxford scholar, Balliol student Samuel Williams, took to the city’s streets last week leading a crowd to call for ‘Zios’ to be put in the ground – in other words, for Jews to be murdered.
Many universities, Oxford among them, rely on donors to subsidise their work. Some of the most generous, such as Stephen Schwarzman, Len Blavatnik and Simon and David Reuben are entrepreneurial businessmen who are hardly in sympathy with woke causes or soft on anti-Semitism. But that is what they find themselves funding. Oxford is happy to take their money, shove a name on a building, and then ignore their views and indulge their ideological enemies.
If Britain is to recover its intellectual vitality, institutional self-confidence and civilisational energy, we must learn to stop subsidising, indulging and acquiescing in the surrender of what was once most prestigious in our culture to the advance of wokery. Buccaneering business leaders might believe association with universities such as Oxford now lends them lustre – but they are only paying for more logs to be flung on their funeral pyre.
The philanthropy of those who believe in upholding our civilisation does not deserve to be directed towards an institution which regards the story of the West as a chronicle of colonialist shame. For Oxford, and not just the Union, the embrace of progressive nonsense has gone well beyond a joke. It’s time for a new beginning.
Michael Gove is editor of The Spectator.
