by Celia Walden, Telegraph
While most would consider a male colleague wearing fake breasts to work unprofessional, in academia it’s called ‘inclusivity’
If my child were considering university right now, I’m not sure I’d actively be encouraging them to fill out those Ucas forms. Not a week goes by without some absurd tale of university wokery hitting the headlines, but over the past few days campus lunacy seems to have reached new heights.
First we had academics (at Queen Mary University of London) being denied promotion for opposing the concept of unconscious bias. Yes, unless you agree to engage in an AA-style ideological loyalty oath that sounds not unlike the serenity prayer – “Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept that I am a racist bigot” – you’re basically going to be treading water for the rest of your career.
Then reports of “the giant-breasted, bearded lecturer of Oxford University” came in. Apparently a lecturer in biochemistry at St Hilda’s College named Matt Rattley has been “violating women’s dignity” by wearing a set of enormous prosthetic breasts to lectures. And if anything ever illustrated our descent into circusville, it’s surely the flagrant unprofessionalism. If I turned up to Telegraph towers in a giant set of joke-shop boobs, I’d be sent straight home. But of course this is academia, so we have to complicate it and bring in issues of “women’s dignity”.
Finally, on Sunday, we were told about the storming of a lecture at Cambridge University last Friday by a group of activists accusing the professor – James Orr, former head of policy at Reform UK– of spreading “far-Right ideology”.
In a video shared on social media, one of the protesters can be heard struggling to read out a speech of sorts: “James Orr, you are responsible for the rise of hatred in this country. Transphobia, sexism and racism in this country is due to you as head of policy for Reform UK.” And if these are some of Britain’s finest intellects, Mr Orr and his remarkable list of achievements are the least of our problems.
Read also: The James Orr inquisition shames Cambridge by Eric Kaufmann, spiked. Woke crybullies are trying to cancel the one of the university’s last remaining conservatives.