If the right really wants free speech in universities, why is it so obsessed with discrediting students? | Jason Okundaye

Conservatives see these institutions as finishing schools for the next generation of leaders – and they won’t cede them to progressive ideasWhen I was a 20-year-old undergraduate student at Cambridge University, I was plastered all over the national press for making a tweet about white people. It has not turned out to be a big deal for my life or career, but at the time it felt monumental: racist hate mail was sent to my college for months; the Conservative MP Bob Blackman called for my prosecution; and tabloid journalists turned up at my home and harassed my mother (it was August, a famously slow news month). I received a lot of support from the student population, alumni and the police (and none from the university, bar a few kind academics), but it cast a shadow over the rest of my time there – I worried about what future I could have or what employer would hire me if they were to Google my name and see I had attracted scandal. Mostly I wondered why this was national news.I found myself revisiting those memories when considering the storm around George Abaraonye, the now ousted Oxford Union president-elect who attracted significant media attention for laughing at the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk in September. In a WhatsApp group, Abaraonye wrote: “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go”, and on his Instagram account wrote: “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”. This was seen as especially egregious as in May this year Abaraonye had debated Kirk on the subject of toxic masculinity at the Oxford Union. Abaraonye apologised for the posts, stating that he wrote these messages before realising the shooting was fatal, and they were intended to highlight the irony of someone so pro-gun being shot. But then he doubled down, saying: “My words were no less insensitive than his – arguably less so.” Continue reading...

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