IN A 2019 speech to the Bruges Group, Suella Braverman accused British universities of being on the wrong side of the “battle against cultural Marxism” (seen as an anti-semitic conspiracy theory given that “cultural Marxism’s” alleged originators were Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany). 

Since then the Tories have been trying to legislate against higher education “self-censoring” and “forcing people into silence” on behalf of a “progressive monoculture,” as education minister Claire Coutinho puts it. 

However, if Braverman and Coutinho were to step inside a university they’d be thrilled to find an awful lot of decidedly un-woke activity.

Thanks to privatisation that was started by New Labour and hastened by the Tories, universities are now highly competitive businesses funded by fossil fuels companies, arms manufacturers and tyrannical foreign regimes. 

What’s not to like about that for rightwingers? 

And, as a consequence, the successful modern academic is less likely to advocate Marxism — cultural or otherwise — than to be a hard-nosed reactionary with cranky views on the environment, race and gender. 

We’ve moved some way from the liberal ideal of the academic as an independent critic of power and privilege. 

When standing for the Tory leadership last summer, Braverman received £10,000 from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) think tank, which was sanctioned by the Charity Commission in 2014 for its gung-ho denial of human-made climate change. 

If she visited Oxford University she might be pleased to encounter the climate sceptic professors Peter Dobson, Wade Allison and Peter Edwards, who are members of the GWPF’s “academic advisory council.” 

Critics have wondered whether it is sheer coincidence that Oxford received £11 million in funding from… fossil fuel companies from 2015-21. Between 2017 and 2021 UK universities took in a total of £89m from such outfits.

The GWPF’s honorary president is Lord (Nigel) Lawson and its publishing arm has released an essay by Peter Lee, recently promoted to professor of applied ethics at Portsmouth University. 

The foreword was provided by another dubious GWPFer, former Bishop of Chester and ex-lecturer at Durham University, Peter Forster. He’s been in hot water not only for his views on global warming but for asserting that gay people can “reorientate themselves” and for allegedly repressing evidence of clerical abuse in his diocese.

Braverman has rubbished the forms of equality and diversity training designed to prevent such abuse. She’d be reassured that they haven’t swayed academics like Peet Morris, who while teaching on a casual contract at Oxford in 2019, accused female students of “dressing like prostitutes,” called trans people “the genders of flake” and bemoaned “an ever-increasing level of misandry and sexism against [men like] me.” 

Morris might also agree with Braverman’s criticisms of left-wing “misassumptions” about racism and BAME people as “necessarily oppressed.” 

At a private function, Morris told a young Muslim woman — from Bradford — to “go home” to somewhere they have “barbaric practices that subjugated women.”

Also present at the event was Morris’s wife Harriet Dunbar-Morris, now dean of learning and teaching at Portsmouth University, who later denied her husband had made such bigoted remarks. 

Why, then, did other guests on the night come to the Muslim woman’s defence?

Similar aggressions are not unusual on campuses across Britain, from British students of colour being asked “where they really come from” to the case of Zac Adan, a black Manchester University undergraduate who was accused of “looking like a drug dealer” and assaulted by security guards.

These cases are sadly representative of a bigger national trend, suggesting that the problem in universities might well be the opposite of too much wokeness. 

In 2021, Prof David Richardson, chair of Universities UK’s advisory group on racism, stated that British higher education was “institutionally racist.” 

The lecturers’ union UCU recently concluded that sexual harassment is “endemic” in universities, with LGBTQ+, BAME, disabled and casually contracted staff 2.5 times as likely to suffer sexual violence as men. 

Defence partnerships with universities — that include lucrative deals with corrupt firms like BAE Systems and vicious autocracies like Oman and Saudi Arabia — are now worth over £1 billion to UK higher education. 

All of which means that Braverman’s culture war against the left is a phoney one.