Cambridge Students Sure Have a Weird Concept of Academic Freedom

The first stirrings of the concept of academic freedom in the Anglosphere arose in Oxford and Cambridge. Even in some of the most censorious times, the authorities were reluctant to clamp down on controversial discussions among academics. It took centuries for an attitude to transform into a doctrine, but even medieval universities were places where broader discussions could take place, provided that heretics didn’t proselytize too loudly. 

Classical liberals helped formalize the concept, and  Great Britain’s and America’s universities became the envy of the world based on how much more free-wheeling they were intellectually.

Yeah, well, not so much anymore. 

Come to Cambridge and get ostracised as a bigot by your fellow “students” if you are caught reading a book they disagree with.https://t.co/Y5UX88kqCW

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) December 13, 2025

Now, even reading the “wrong” books will get you relentlessly harassed, especially if you cross the most vocal activist groups. Because, you see, you are making people “unsafe” and proving yourself to be a bigot. 

University of Cambridge students allegedly carved the word “Terf” into a fellow undergraduate’s door after she showed interest in gender-critical books.

Thea Sewell, 20, says she was ostracised by friends at Christ’s College and condemned as a “bigot” for possessing literature which disputed gender theory – the notion that gender is changeable.

The second-year philosophy undergraduate, who is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, says she continues to be shouted at in the street for allegedly holding “reprehensible” beliefs on gender.

Ms Sewell has now co-founded the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with other gender-critical students to fight for the right to express their views.

Cambridge has recently come under fire after Newnham, its oldest women-only college, said it would welcome trans women as students despite April’s Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman under the Equality Act means someone who was born female.

At least they have yet to start burning heretics, but there is still time before the complete collapse of Great Britain. Or they could go straight to stoning women when the Islamists take over, once they have thrown all the homosexuals off of roofs.

Ms Sewell said she had bought books by Kathleen Stock, the former University of Sussex professor, Alex Byrne, the philosopher, and Helen Joyce, the gender-critical author, at a talk by the latter in Oxford in April.

Upon returning to Cambridge for Easter term that month, Ms Sewell showed her purchases to another undergraduate and recommended she read them.

“I didn’t think it was going to turn into anything until well, then, everything sort of started falling apart,” she told The Telegraph.

On May 25, she was confronted by a different friend in a communal kitchen in the college who asked her, “Are you a Terf?”, an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

“I actually first said, ‘No, I’m not a Terf’,” she recalled. “And I still actually would stand by that, because I think that that term doesn’t necessarily allow for the nuance that my opinion has.

“I asked her why she thought that, and she said she knew that I owned some gender-critical books, and she knew I’d gone to the Helen Joyce talk. I said to her, ‘Okay, what’s the problem with that? I’m a philosophy student. I’m going to own philosophy books. I could also own Mein Kampf. It wouldn’t make me a Nazi.’

“Her response was that buying books from bigots is the same as being a bigot,” she said.

Ironically, back in the Dark Ages, when I was a graduate student at Duke, all political science majors had to take a class called “Political Ideologies,” and among the required readings were selections from “Mein Kampf.” At the time, this was hardly controversial, since people still considered knowing what others think a rather important part of education, and it is impossible to discuss 20th-century political thought without reading Hitler, Marx, Mussolini, and other thinkers who helped drive political thought. 

Not that reading critiques of gender ideology should be put in the same category. Quite the opposite. 

Were I still teaching, I would certainly include selections on Critical Theory. You can’t understand late 20th-century thought or politics without a deep familiarity with it, and you certainly can’t deprogram somebody steeped in that vile set of theories without understanding them. 

Leftist ideology, at least the version that is widespread among the youth, depends entirely on the brainwashing of the youth. So much of it contradicts our daily experience and common sense, and so little of it is logically consistent (in fact, it disdains logic as derived from white ideology), that only people who have been brainwashed could possibly take it seriously. 

Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body. (6/7) pic.twitter.com/x8KZ5rEaeW

— Scientific American (@sciam) August 24, 2022

Only a brainwashed person could believe that the concept of “sex” was invented by white men in the 18th century,  but there it is. The only way to combat this idiocy is to encourage free expression and debate. Suppressing ideas, even bad ones, is illiberal and self-defeating. 

Liberals often claim that specific ideas should be suppressed so that people who don’t fit norms can be free to be themselves, but that misses the obvious: suppressing people who disagree with nonconformists takes away their freedom. 

Academia has been ideologically captured, and is now, intellectually, one of the least free places in Western society. 

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