Delingpole: Cambridge Snowflakes Rescind Jordan Peterson’s Visiting Fellowship

Cambridge University has rescinded the offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson after snowflake students complained about his WrongThink.

Dr Peterson had been invited to give a series of lectures on the Bible to the university’s Faculty of Divinity.

But after complaints from the Cambridge University Students Union (CUSU), the Faculty caved.

Here is the statement issued by CUSU – three minutes after the Divinity Faculty withdrew its offer:

We are relieved to hear that Jordan Peterson’s request for a visiting fellowship to Cambridge’s faculty of divinity has been rescinded following further review. It is a political act to associate the University with an academic’s work through offers which legitimise figures such as Peterson. His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.

An article in the student rag Varsity went into more detail about the kind of WrongThink which made Peterson unfit to give lectures at their formerly distinguished university.

His crimes included: calling “white privilege” a “myth”; doubting the “scientific consensus” on climate change; claiming that men are victims of “gender oppression;” arguing that the patriarchy is “predicated on competence.”

Another reason might well be that the cry-bully leftists with which the university suppurates like a venereal sore objected to the intellectual drubbing Peterson administered to them last time he spoke at the Cambridge Union debating society. Their behaviour is straight out of the SJW playbook: if you can’t win an argument, close it down.

As former Cambridge graduate student Toby Young comments here this is a very sad day for standards at his alma mater.

As we know, today’s students cannot cope with being challenged – hence the need for ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias reporting hotlines’. In case you’re in any doubt that this is, in fact, the reason the undergraduates threw up their arms in horror and reached for the smelling salts as soon as Dr Peterson’s name was mentioned, a spokesman from Cambridge University’s Student Union spelt it out in Pravda – I mean, Varsity: ‘His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.’

Silly me. There I was thinking the purpose of a university education is to introduce students to ‘work and views’ they might not be familiar with and don’t already hold. In fact, it is to expose them to just those ideas that they are firmly wedded to. An echo chamber, where privately-educated, sanctimonious Titania McGraths are constantly told by their professors that they’re absolutely right about everything.

But in order for this kind of fascism to prevail it needs to be endorsed by the authorities and the broader culture. These snowflakes, though vocal and aggressive, are still a minority – just as the Nazis were in the early 1930s and the Bolsheviks in 1917.

The bigger failing here lies with the university authorities. When I was at university in the 1980s, it was a given that nothing the student union (not to be confused with the debating society, the Oxford Union) said needed to be taken seriously: it was just wanky leftists whose frontal lobes hadn’t yet formed sounding off about the fashionable socialistic concerns of the day. Meanwhile, my university got on with the business of trying to form its undergraduates’ intellects and moral character. Same rules applied at Cambridge.

Now all has changed. Suddenly the university faculty has started treating these nasty little tics’ horrid intersectional ideology seriously and acting as if it had anything to do with the price of eggs – which it really doesn’t. The SJW creed, like fascism, Nazism, Maoism and all the other totalitarian ideologies, only becomes real if the grown-ups accept it as real.

This is like 1968 all over again when the grown-ups ceded all responsibility and the stupid angry kids took over.

Cambridge no longer deserves to be taken seriously as a world class university. Mind you, nor does Oxford. Nor do the Ivy League. They’ve all been SJW converged.

Sad. And dangerous. If this is where our ‘brightest and best’ are picking up their ideas, what future for a Western Civilisation based on logic, reason, empiricism, merit and freedom of speech?