Champion of Free Expression Spends £230,000 Suing Its Own Students Into Silence
Cambridge sought a five-year protest ban, settled for one, and discovered the “persons unknown” clause is the closest British law comes to grounding an entire student body at once
CAMBRIDGE — The University of Cambridge, an institution whose prospectus speaks warmly of “robust debate” and “challenging ideas,” spent much of the past eighteen months in the High Court trying to stop its own students debating and challenging ideas on the university’s own lawns. According to BBC reporting on the injunction proceedings, Cambridge originally sought a five-year ban on pro-Palestine protests, a request Mr Justice Fordham declined in February, before the university returned with a narrower four-month order in March and, in September, a full year-long injunction covering Senate House, Old Schools, Greenwich House and Chestnut Tree Lawn.
The £230,000 Cost Of Reading The Room Incorrectly
Cambridge’s own barrister told the court that previous demonstrations had caused “over £230,000 in added costs for security, legal fees and cleaning,” a figure the university presumably could have spent on almost anything else, including — hypothetically — actually listening to the students it was about to sue.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to protest, the European Legal Support Centre, and Liberty all intervened against the university, with Liberty’s Head of Policy and Campaigns Ruth Ehrlich warning that the judgment “sets a dangerous precedent which will severely restrict protest rights on campus.” One imagines the university’s Communications team filing this under “feedback,” in the same drawer as everything else this year.
“Persons Unknown”: Cambridge’s New Favourite Legal Fiction
The injunction targets “persons unknown,” a formulation that allows the university to ban an entire category of hypothetical future protesters without naming a single one of them — the legal equivalent of grounding the whole class because somebody, allegedly, at some point, might throw something. It is, in its way, an elegant piece of anticipatory litigation: suing people before they have done anything, on the theory that they might.
Protesters, for their part, responded to the university’s “Please keep off the grass” signage with the minor act of vandalism most likely to be Instagrammed: altering it to read “Please keep off Palestine,” a piece of activist wordplay Cambridge’s own English faculty would, in any other context, have awarded a first.
The Stormzy Problem
Matters came to a head in June when a Chestnut Tree Lawn encampment disrupted a graduation ceremony at which Stormzy was receiving an honorary doctorate in law — meaning the university’s most photogenic celebration of its own inclusivity credentials was interrupted by students exercising precisely the kind of grassroots activism the university otherwise claims to champion in its prospectus, several paragraphs above the bit about lawn maintenance.
Pro-Vice-Chancellors Monitor Situation From A Safe Distance, As Is Traditional
Professors Bhaskar Vira and Kamal Munir, the pro-vice-chancellors for education and for community and engagement respectively, were reported to have received protesters’ demands and “monitored” the encampment — a verb doing a great deal of work for an institution that simultaneously took its own monitored students to the High Court three separate times.
A Comedian From Norwich Puts The Sums Right
“£230,000 on lawyers and cleaning,” observed one comedian on the East Anglian circuit this month, “for a university that also, somehow, cannot afford to check a professor’s PhD thesis for fifteen years. Priorities, love. Priorities.”
Sister Publication Note
Bohiney.com readers following American campus-encampment injunctions this year will recognise the genre exactly: institutions that describe themselves as bastions of free expression right up until the free expression happens somewhere with good lighting for the yearbook photo.
Six Observations From Cambridge’s Department of Selective Free Speech
- The university that champions “robust debate” spent £230,000 preventing debate that was, by definition, robust.
- A five-year injunction request was whittled down to one year, which the university is presenting as restraint.
- “Persons unknown” is now Cambridge’s preferred legal category, roughly equivalent to banning weather.
- Protesters’ vandalism showed better command of wordplay than most of the university’s press releases.
- Stormzy’s honorary doctorate ceremony was interrupted by the exact spirit of activism Cambridge’s marketing team spent years trying to associate itself with.
- Two pro-vice-chancellors “monitored” a protest their own employer was simultaneously suing into non-existence.
Disclaimer: This is a work of British satirical news and satirical journalism, produced in the tradition of UK satire. Quotations attributed to fictional comedians and internal drawers are satirical inventions or paraphrased for effect; the court proceedings, costs, and named interventions are drawn from the cited reporting. This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings — the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
