What’s behind Cambridge’s anonymous reporting system?

Here is a challenge. Cambridge University provides an electronic Daily News Digest to anyone who wants to see how the university is being reported in the press. Will the News Digest include this article? On past form, that seems unlikely.

When arguments arose in the past few weeks about Cambridge’s Report + Support website, which offered the opportunity to make anonymous denunciations against individuals deemed to have committed ‘micro-aggressions’ (such as being critical of a student’s work, even if it is bad, or praising the English of a non-native speaker), the Digest went quiet. A few days after the Telegraph published a letter against the website signed by 25 senior academics, a cryptic link was provided to an out-of-date edition of the newspaper. After the Times and Daily Mail picked up the story, links remained sparse. Meanwhile the Digest published, day after day, updates on a story about medieval bunions which, a Cambridge archaeologist suggests, were brought on by pointy shoes.

We all know the press keeps a close eye on Cambridge and Oxford, fascinated by the way two ancient institutions are dragging themselves into (what they imagine to be) 21st-century realities. The catalogue of their obsessions deserves its own daily digest. When one of the fiercest opponents of the Rhodes statue signs off as ‘Rhodes professor of race relations’ we might feel there is a whiff of hypocrisy in Oxford about when, how and whether Rhodes should be ‘cancelled’. But Cambridge has overtaken Oxford in zealotry. Jesus College Chapel contains a monument to the slave-trader Tobias Rustat by Grinling Gibbons; Historic England is contesting plans for its removal. There is the window at Gonville & Caius College in memory of R.A. Fisher, the geneticist and statistician (and eugenicist), whose removal became an issue for students who had mostly been unaware it was there.