Trinity College, Cambridge Has Been Captured by an Uncritical, Average Civil-Service, New-Liberal, Corporate-Agreeable, Globalist Sect

I studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is a grand college: has no sense of inferiority. They have dinners where they say they have more Nobel Prizes than France. I probably acquired a sense of indomitability from being an undergraduate there: I stayed as a graduate, and only later realised that those who came in from other universities felt obliged to work hard in order to prove their worthiness, whereas I was rather careless, still gilded by the gold of youthful glory. When I look back I sometimes wonder how I would have had to change my behaviour in order to become a Cambridge Professor. Certainly, what I did was wrong. I struggled against the system, in finals got my lowest marks (an unforgettable beta double minus and gamma minus) in the subject I now teach (“arrogant and ignorant,“ said the examiner) and survived only as an eccentric hangover of the old order. 

What is Trinity? It is a Great Court, built on the site of two older medieval halls, and paid for out of some of the money Henry VIII acquired by dissolving the monasteries. The college, somewhat ironically, was called the Holy and Undivided Trinity: Henry VIII trying to indicate that he was doing something for religion rather than against it. And Trinity has thrown out a vast number of famous names: Francis Bacon, Lord Macaulay, Isaac Newton and Tennyson can all be seen in statuesque form in the chapel. There were also Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and among scientists, James Clerk Maxwell, J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. When I was an undergraduate, the Master was the renowned mathematician, Michael Atiyah. Later, there was Amartya Sen. Lord Byron went to Trinity – of course he did. He had a bear, wrote poems, enjoyed an irregular love life, died trying to liberate Greece. 

It all sounds glorious. It was. Back in the 1990s, everything looked as it had probably done in the 1950s. A bus drove through the centre of town. There were bookshops everywhere. The rooms had bar fires and blankets on the beds. There were hardly any cafes. No one had a phone or a television. Everyone had a sheet of paper on the door for messages, whimsical and frequent. I knew where no one was, and so spent great amounts of time, like Diogenes, without lamp but with bicycle, drifting around in search of a man or woman. Only slowly were the cafes and quilts coming in, and the bookshops and buses going out. Trinity generously paid to increase the temperature in the University Library, to help the scholars dose at their books. (The irony: twenty years later they have lowered the temperature in the college, to keep the scholars alert for the coming climate apocalypse.) College bars were spruced up: when I arrived in Trinity, the college bar was a revolting place which I only entered twice. ‘Norman’, the barman, looked quite out of place when they built him a new airport style bar. 

Enough of all that. The reason I am writing this is to say that Trinity is in trouble, and is in more trouble than has been made public. Last week, David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator that Trinity should not have sent some spears back to Australia – spears originally taken by Captain Cook’s men – and related this to the recent invigorating spraying-on and slashing-of the portrait of Lord Balfour in Trinity by an aggrieved young pro-Palestinian woman. Abulafia complained that Trinity’s response to the latter was “soggy”. The college said it “regretted the damage done” and wanted to offer “support” to anyone “affected” by the incident. The spears to suggest the college is soggily decolonising rapidly. But the “soggy” response is not simply to do with spears and paintings. It is also to do with – deep breath – COVID-19.

Every alumnus of Trinity receives a copy of the Annual Record. It is a compilation of speeches, notices and obituaries. But in 2020 something changed. The Annual Record, probably for the first time in its history, started to become a propaganda sheet. 

Part of the reason is probably that the Master at the time was, and still is, Dame Sally Davies. She was appointed in 2019, and was the first woman to become Master. More significantly, she had no prior connection to the college. Contrast this with the previous Masters: Winter, Rees, Sen, Atiyah, Huxley, Hodgkin – all academics and originally undergraduates at Trinity. We have to go back to Rab Butler in the 1960s to find someone who was not an undergraduate and then was appointed Master: though his great-uncle had also been Master and Butlers have been tied up with Cambridge for centuries. Does this matter? Well, what we have is an institution which cares a great deal about institutional continuity. But then, a new Master is appointed in 2019: not really an academic; in fact, a doctor-turned-civil-servant, coming from Manchester Medical School, the University of London, the Civil Service and the Department of Health. As if this were not enough, [flourish with drum and trumpets] she was Chief Medical Officer previous to Chris Whitty. 

Let me take you through the Annual Records. In 2020, there was not much about Covid, though there was plenty about ‘greening’ the college, and raising the LGBTQ+ flag during all of February. It was in 2021 that I began to wonder what had gone wrong. Baron Chartres, former Bishop of London, gave a feeble speech in March at the Feast for the Commemoration of Benefactors (held online) about how we should abandon ‘egocentricity’ and adopt ‘ecocentricity’ – also using the phrase ‘build back better’. He spoke of ‘lockdown’ as a ‘compulsory Lent’. Another speech was given by a Professor who was serving on SPI-M and SAGE, and who complimented the Master for having moved “from guarding the health of our nation, to ensuring the continued health of our college”. Then Dame Sally Davies herself gave a speech. Here are the relevant bits:

We could have entered lockdown earlier… I still do not understand why it took Europe, and Britain in particular, so long to accept the evidence that mask wearing protected others from catching Covid as well as themselves… Our Council agreed in June that… we would insist on mask wearing within college… By now the evidence is clear on this issue. Indeed, recently the American Centres for Disease Control shared the evidence that wearing two masks was better than one… Easter term arrived, sadly not with our students… Our chaplains have been leading masked and distanced welfare teas and pizza evenings, even Halloween events, and all within Government guidelines… A highlight of this Lent term has been the agreement by Council to commit Trinity College to achieve carbon Net Zero by 2050 and to divest from all fossil fuel investments in public equities before the end of 2021… Fellows have been asked not to come into college… We are lucky none of our Fellows died of Covid… We all recognise that this pandemic has exposed and amplified existing structural inequalities, physical and mental health deficits as well as the chronic under-funding of many services and sectors. The exit strategy for universities will, like other sectors, be linked to the suppression of the virus… Our purpose in Trinity is scholarship. [“Evidently not,” I wrote in the margin.]

There was also good news from the BA (that is, undergraduate) Society, which opened new posts for an Ethnic and Inclusion Officer and an Environmental Officer. Eid al-Fitr was celebrated for the first time by the college. 

The speech next year was equally stimulating. There was more talk of “decarbonising”. Also, mention was made of visits to the college by those heroes of the modern higher thought, Justin Welby, Nancy Pelosi and Stormzy – I kid ye not. 

Your college [declared the Master] continues to be a pioneer of sustainability in Cambridge… I have been working hard too… In 2020, as I watched the pandemic sweep across our world, I came to the realisation that government and health system responses were based on limited data. To respond effectively, they needed behavioural data, including movement, attitudes, behaviours, expenditure and more – yet, when we look for the status, this data is generally held in the private sector. So with support from Council, colleagues and the WHO, I set up the Trinity Challenge. I raised £7.8 million to run this charity and awarded £7.8.million prize money aiming to surface and foster innovation through a challenge, to strengthen our work as a global society… [blah, blah] Google, Microsoft, Facebook… [blah, blah] I want to thank McKinsey and Company… Please recognise that whatever politicians say about Covid, it is probable we will see new variants… Brexit is another storm that returns time and time again…

I am not sure what is going on. First of all, with the language: ‘status’ and ‘surface’ seem to have acquired new meanings. But it should now be obvious that a major academic institution has been captured by a sort of uncritical, average civil-service, new-liberal, corporate-agreeable, globalist opinion, which can only be intended to impose woeful conformity on the minds of our most brilliant young. I fear for the university. Cambridge was still eccentric and electric, varied and wayward when I was there. Now it seems to be emptying itself out from the river to the sea, by way of Kings Lynn. It wouldn’t surprise me if Oxford and Cambridge are entering a second 18th Century – when everything intellectually interesting will have to happen somewhere else (as it did in the 18th Century, just ask Adam Smith or Edward Gibbon). I say this, with the qualification that all our latest professors probably think of themselves as the Newtons, Macaulays and Bacons of our age: as they trot out their robotic ChatGPT opinions on climate change, humanitarian catastrophe, sustainability, inequality, masks and Brexit.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.