The legacy of Stephen Toope

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, has begun this academic year by announcing it will be his last in the post. Professor Toope says, no doubt truthfully, that he wants to see more of his Canadian family, dissevered from him by Covid. But I think it reasonable to relate his departure to wider issues. When he arrived in 2017, the ‘Golden Era’ of UK/Chinese relations still, in theory, existed. Cambridge uncritically welcomed Chinese government and business participation. In 2019, speaking in China, Professor Toope hailed the China Development Forum’s ‘Greater Opening Up for Win-Win Cooperation’ and praised President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. A preface composed in his name for a document praising Huawei — and paid for by Huawei — was published by Jesus College’s China/UK Global Issues Dialogue Centre. As Chinese policies began literally to make the world ill, Cambridge’s approach came under scrutiny. Investigating the college’s China Centre, I found that it steadfastly failed to hold any meeting critical of the policies of the Chinese Communist party towards the Uighurs, Hong Kong and so on. Work by Sam Dunning and others, published in the Times this month, has exposed that, even now, three out of the four directors of the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management have ties to Huawei. There is more to come.

At the same time as it indulged a totalitarian regime, Cambridge became harshly censorious of long-dead benefactors if even faintly linked to the slave trade. Various curriculums are being ‘decolonised’. A definition of freedom of speech was proposed by the university hierarchy which would have abridged that right by insisting that people must ‘respect’ all opinions with which they differed. It was heavily defeated by the dons. A scheme called Report + Support designed to help the anonymous denunciation of alleged sexual predators and racists published a series of preposterous definitions of ‘micro-aggressions’.