Mick Hartley

A version of Helen Joyce's open letter to "Pippa and Andrew" of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge has now been published in the Spectator:

This is what those who go against the new orthodoxies face; the idea that we should be able to discuss and challenge each other's arguments is gone. The academic commitment to fair-minded debate is over. Instead, Caius residents have been presented with an ignorant and insulting characterisation of me. My work is dismissed as ‘polemics’ and the authors of this message insist that they ‘will not be attending the event’ in an email that they must have known would go public….

They say that they work hard to make Caius an ‘inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows’, and that my event ‘will not contribute to this aim’. How inclusive and welcoming do they think this sort of shunning makes their college feel to students, staff and fellows who care about sex-based rights? To those who want to attend my talk, but are frightened that there will be protests, enabled by their unwillingness to give unqualified support for free speech? To women who understand their identities are based on biology, not tired sexist stereotypes? To the people – and some do still exist in Cambridge; even if these two don’t hear from them, I do – who still care about the highest ideals of academia, and watch despairingly as it is shredded?

If they truly think that I, and what I say, is so awful, surely they should come along and point out my errors? Why not tell me to my face that I’m offensive, insulting and hateful? Why not critique my book and tell the world what I have got wrong? Instead, they have given license to the little totalitarians who wish to see me silenced rather than debated.

I’m sure they have read 1984. I often think about the moment when Winston, while being tortured, cries out: ‘Do it to Julia!’ They know that if they do not kowtow to the new identitarian orthodoxy, their students might turn on them. They would rather see anger taken out on me because, I think, they are afraid of their own students.

Can we expect a reply from Pippa and Andrew? Unlikely.Will there be a loud demonstration at the event on Tuesday? Almost certainly – especially now that the Gonville and Caius powers-that-be have effectively given the green light to expressions of outrage as opposed to civilised debate.