There is something almost perfectly fitting about the latest absurdity to emerge from Oxbridge. While the absolute absurdity of the Jason Arday affaire centres on Cambridge, it could just as easily have occurred at Oxford, an institution founded in the Middle Ages to serve the Christian faith, and for centuries one of the great intellectual strongholds of Christendom, is now as capable of giving a platform to a man whose claims and qualifications ought to have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny, while treating the colour of his skin as a qualification in itself, as is Cambridge.
That is not merely a story about one dubious appointment, invitation or academic fashion. It is a story about what happens when an institution loses sight of the purpose for which it exists. Once truth is displaced by ideology, merit by identity and judgement by fashionable moral posturing, the old machinery of scholarship can continue to function while the thing that gave it meaning has quietly disappeared.
It is tempting to blame all this on the modern phenomenon called “wokeism”. Certainly, the present disease is unmistakably woke. The obsession with race, representation, diversity and the supposed moral necessity of giving certain people a hearing because of the colour of their skin is intellectually grotesque. A university that claims to value equality has somehow arrived at the extraordinary idea that people should first be classified by race and then judged according to the category into which they have been placed.
But Oxford’s (for it is that institution that I know best and which is the subject of this essay) troubles did not begin yesterday. Nor did it begin with the arrival of diversity officers, equality statements and fashionable theories of intersectionality. The deeper rot goes back much further to the great religious and intellectual upheaval of the nineteenth century, when the old Christian character of Oxford was deliberately dismantled.
This was recognised at the time by one of the most formidable politicians of the Victorian age.
On 10 October 1872, Lord Salisbury addressed the Church Congress at the Mechanics’ Institute in Leeds. His subject was the effect of the Universities Tests Act, passed the previous year. Salisbury understood what was happening with a clarity which is striking when read nearly a century and a half later. The old Oxford had not merely been a place where Christians happened to study. Christianity was woven into its constitution. For centuries, membership of the Church of England was a condition of full participation in university life. Oxford itself notes that, from the late sixteenth century until the nineteenth century, students, fellows and professors were subject to religious requirements.
That system was already being dismantled. In 1854 the requirement to subscribe to the Church of England at matriculation and graduation was removed, apart from theology students. Yet the colleges retained many restrictions, and important academic posts remained closed to non-Anglicans. The decisive break came with the Universities Tests Act of 1871, which opened Oxford to people of all faiths and none.
It is worth being precise here. The change did not mean that Oxford instantly became an atheist institution. Nor was the removal of religious tests in itself some wicked act. There were obvious injustices in a system that excluded able men merely because they belonged to the wrong Christian denomination, and the Victorian reformers had respectable arguments on their side.
But Salisbury saw the danger in something deeper than denominational discrimination.
He said that the great effect of the Tests Act was negative: “All hindrance to the teaching of infidelity has been taken away.” He then warned that the great danger was that there might arise inside the universities, “especially, I fear, inside Oxford”, a “nucleus and focus of infidel teaching and influence”. He feared that Oxford colleges might eventually play the same “disastrous part” that German universities had played in the “de-Christianisation of the upper and middle classes”.
That is a remarkable prophecy.
Salisbury was not predicting that Oxford would cease to teach Latin, Greek, mathematics, history or science. He was warning that an institution could remain intellectually brilliant while losing the religious and moral framework within which its intellectual life had once been conducted. And that distinction is crucial. A university can produce clever people without producing wise people. It can produce specialists without producing educated men and women. It can teach thousands of facts while losing any agreement about what constitutes truth, goodness, beauty, duty or human worth.
That is precisely the long-term significance of what happened at Oxford in the nineteenth century.
The 39 Articles had not simply been a piece of religious bureaucracy. They represented a statement of the Christian intellectual world in which the university existed. The old requirement to affirm the Articles meant that Oxford was not pretending to be philosophically neutral. It knew what it was for. The subsequent reforms steadily stripped away those religious tests. By 1871 the last substantial barriers to non-Anglicans entering the university and holding academic posts had been removed. Oxford’s own historical account describes this as the moment when the university was finally opened to “all faiths and none”.
That phrase — “all faiths and none” — tells the whole story.
Once “none” becomes a perfectly adequate intellectual and institutional position, the university has ceased to be founded upon a shared account of ultimate truth. That may be necessary in a modern plural society, but it is not neutral. It creates a vacuum. And vacuums do not remain empty.
The Christian assumptions that had once supplied the moral architecture were gradually replaced by other creeds: liberalism, positivism, socialism, Marxism, Freudianism, racial theories, postmodernism and, eventually, the peculiar collection of doctrines now gathered under the label “woke”.
The old religious test had been removed in the name of intellectual freedom. But intellectual freedom does not guarantee intellectual seriousness. Once a common intellectual tradition disappears, fashion can become orthodoxy just as readily as religion once did. Indeed, there is an extraordinary irony here.
Victorian reformers thought that removing religious tests would make Oxford more open-minded. Today’s Oxford is in many respects extraordinarily closed-minded — not because it requires everybody to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, but because it can become fiercely intolerant of anyone who challenges the latest ideological orthodoxy.
The old test said, in effect: believe this.
The new test can say: believe whatever you like, provided you do not challenge the approved assumptions about race, sex, colonialism, identity and power.
The vocabulary has changed. The phenomenon has not. This brings us back to the present fiasco.
The most revealing feature of the modern university’s obsession with diversity is not that it seeks to hear people from different backgrounds. Of course a university should do that. It is one of the pleasures of intellectual life to encounter people whose experience is different from one’s own. The problem begins when identity is confused with authority.
A person’s skin colour does not make him an expert. Nor does his sex, sexuality, ancestry or ethnic background. A black historian can be brilliant or foolish; a white historian can be brilliant or foolish. An Asian economist can be brilliant or foolish; a European economist can be brilliant or foolish. The colour of a man’s skin tells us almost nothing about whether what he says is true.
That should be so obvious that it hardly needs saying. Yet the ideology of diversity has produced an extraordinary inversion. Having spent decades telling us that people must not be judged by their skin colour, the new orthodoxy has resurrected racial classification and given it a moral halo. The result is a particularly poisonous form of patronage. A person who would never have attracted serious attention on the strength of his intellectual work may receive a platform because he fits the right demographic category. Once established, his critics can find themselves in the awkward position of appearing to attack not his arguments but his identity.
This is precisely why the word “woke” matters. Wokeism is not simply a collection of left-wing opinions. It is a method of deciding who deserves authority. It places identity before argument. That is fundamentally hostile to the university. The university, at its best, exists to do the opposite. It should ask: What is the evidence? Is the argument sound? Are the sources reliable? Has the claim survived hostile scrutiny? Is the scholar honest? Can the conclusion be challenged?
The colour of the scholar’s face should be irrelevant.
This is why Salisbury’s warning matters today. He understood that the great danger was not that Oxford would suddenly become a madhouse of atheists. It was that the intellectual foundations of the university would be weakened until something else could occupy the space. He called it a “nucleus and focus of infidel teaching and influence”. He was writing in 1872, not 2026.
Yet look at Oxford now. The old Christian framework has largely vanished. The university proudly celebrates its transformation into a global institution open to every faith and none. The nineteenth-century reforms that removed religious tests are today presented as a great step towards modern equality.
Perhaps they were. But Salisbury’s question remains unanswered: what replaces the thing that has been removed? For a time, the answer was a mixture of Victorian liberalism, classical education, public service and inherited Christian morality. Oxford could abandon the formal religious tests without immediately abandoning the habits of mind that Christianity had helped create. That inheritance lasted for generations.
But inheritances can be spent.
The modern university has spent much of Oxford’s intellectual inheritance while congratulating itself on being progressive. And once the old Christian conception of man; sinful but responsible, imperfect but possessing inherent dignity, capable of reason yet bound by moral law, was pushed aside, other conceptions rushed in.
Today, the fashionable Oxford conception of man is increasingly tribal. People are sorted into identities. History is read through the lens of race and power. Moral status is attached to membership of groups. Speech is assessed according to who says it rather than whether it is true. That is not enlightenment. It is superstition dressed in academic language.
And so the latest Oxbridge fiasco is best understood not as an isolated embarrassment but as another symptom of a disease that has been developing for 150 years. Salisbury saw the first stage. He saw a university in which the barriers protecting its Christian intellectual character were being removed. He feared that Oxford might become a centre from which the abandonment of Christianity would spread through the educated classes. He was right about the direction of travel, even if he could not possibly have imagined the strange destination.
The irony is almost too rich. Oxford was once accused of being too Christian. It is now desperately concerned with being diverse enough, inclusive enough and ideologically correct enough. It once demanded intellectual assent to the 39 Articles. It now demands assent, sometimes explicit, sometimes merely implied, to an ever-changing collection of propositions about race, identity and social justice. The old oath was at least honest about what it was. The new one pretends not to exist.
The lesson is not that Oxford should turn the clock back to 1872, nor that every academic must subscribe to Anglican theology. The lesson is much simpler and much more important. A university must judge ideas by their truth, not by the complexion of the person who utters them. It must reward scholarship, not identity. It must welcome argument rather than manufacture consensus. And above all, it must recover the courage to say that some things are true and some things are false, however fashionable the falsehood may be.
Until it does, Oxford will continue to possess its ancient buildings, its libraries, its gowns, its ceremonies and its magnificent name. It will still look like the university that Cardinal Newman, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson and countless other great minds would recognise. But appearances can deceive. The real question is whether the institution still possesses the intellectual soul that made Oxford great.
Lord Salisbury, standing in Leeds in October 1872, saw the beginning of the problem. He warned that Oxford might become a “nucleus and focus” of intellectual forces that would help de-Christianise the educated classes. One hundred and fifty-four years later, it is hard not to wonder whether the old Tory had understood the danger rather better than the reformers who defeated him.
And where Oxford led, parliament, the judiciary, civil service and many other formerly great institutions. Have followed.
(UKR)