London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2025

Students who complain about abuse on campus are being ‘wokesmeared’

Students who complain about abuse on campus are being ‘wokesmeared’

Far from being hotbeds of political correctness, universities are ignoring victims of sexual harassment, racism and bullying
As the Windrush scandal was breaking, it became clear that there were two parallel perceptions of the UK’s immigration system. Those who had been mangled by the Home Office machine knew the truth: that the system was cruel and broken. The other view, more popular but fabricated, was that the country’s immigration policy was lax, gullible and open to abuse.

The same now applies to life on Britain’s university campuses. Last week a report found a culture of non-disclosure agreement abuse. NDAs, originally designed to prevent departing university staff from sharing professional secrets, are now being used to gag victims of sexual harassment, bullying and poor teaching in order to protect the abusers and, by extension, the universities themselves. Freedom of information requests by the BBC in 2019 revealed that UK universities had paid about £87m in NDA payoffs in the previous two years. This suggests a nationwide and institutional failure to protect students from predatory abusers, a culture of exploitation of those who are vulnerable, and a failure to meet the needs of those with disabilities. In other cases, when universities failed to adequately investigate sexual assault allegations, students were pressured into signing NDAs without even receiving a payout, the BBC report found. This is likely to be only the latest instalment in a series of revelations exposing an unregulated culture of thuggery and malpractice in academic establishments. In October, an inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found that about a quarter of minority ethnic students, including non-British white students, said they had experienced racial harassment since the start of their course, and that not only did British universities not tackle the thousands of racist incidents experienced, they also refused to acknowledge the scale of the problem.

It is also likely that students’ negative experiences and any potential measures to address their widespread concerns will continue to be submerged by a fictional, popular narrative of British universities as a hotbed of woke culture populated by a snowflake generation wanting to eject from jobs or the public space anyone who in their sensitive eyes has offended them. Another word for this alleged behaviour is “cancel culture”. The term now has its own entry in the urban dictionary, which calls it a phenomenon perpetrated by those “quick to judge and slow to question”.

Little is said of what is arguably more prevalent and more effective: what I call wokesmearing – the stigmatising and shaming of someone for crimes of extreme political correctness. Wokesmearing has a more powerful engine than worthy students. The rightwing press and tabloid media will fix on any incident that looks like it may be an example of progressive values overstepping the mark. If none or few of these incidents are found, they are made up. Scant details are tortured into solid stories, and before those stories can be challenged or even corrected, they have passed into the mainstream narrative.

Take the case of Lola Olufemi. All she and her fellow Cambridge students wanted to do was introduce some new writers into their syllabus. In 2017, they sent an open letter to the literature faculty requesting that non-white authors be added to the curriculum. Four months later, after precisely zero complaints from fellow students or members of the faculty, and before any decision had been made, the Telegraph published Olufemi’s picture on its front page with the headline: “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”. Within days the story was given credibility when it was debated in earnest on BBC Radio 4. The very channel that broke the NDA story is frequently a useful tool for the promotion of stories that originate in less responsible outlets, a gullible eager consumer of fake outrage. When I spoke to Olufemi a few months later, she said the most frustrating thing, other than “being called upon to address the lies as if they were legitimate”, was that the artificial outrage obscured what was actually happening on the ground on campus, the abuse she was receiving and the chill that had been sent down the spines of other black students – many of whom were from disadvantaged backgrounds and could not afford loss of future employment prospects if they were seen as troublemakers. The whole effort to simply add more authors to a syllabus, not to replace any, had been successfully wokesmeared.

And on it goes. As university campuses become increasingly unsafe for students and employees, a carousel of mythical stories is confected, amplified and recycled. So rich has this genre of reporting become that it now has its own formula: big, flashy, pearl-clutching headline followed by a quote from someone scandalised by the latest liberty-taking, then rounded off by a tiny detail, one buried at the end, that invalidates the whole story. One such example is a BBC news dispatch from October 2017. It starts with “Cambridge Uni students get Shakespeare trigger warnings”, only to end with: “Some lecturers indicate that some sensitive material will be covered in a lecture … this is entirely at the lecturer’s own discretion and is in no way indicative of a faculty-wide policy.”

The same principle is applied to all the developments we now take as an integral part of British campus culture, such as safe spaces and no-platforming and terrified administrators cowed by leftie students. No-platforming in particular is frequently presented as a simple case of mob rule and of frightened faculties placating students, when they often, far less contentiously, involve college bureaucrats lacking the resources to responsibly curate controversial union debates and the associated right of protest that comes with that.

The repercussions of the campaign by the cynical and the credulous are not just limited to point scoring in a culture war. The overall result is a climate unreceptive to the anxiety of students on British campuses. The fact that report after report states that universities are failing to act is down to more than just denial; it is a complacency and an impunity fostered by a rightwing culture that reinforces and perpetuates the myth that liberal spaces, especially universities, are dangerous, progressive playgrounds undermining tradition and common sense. Until that propaganda is acknowledged and combated, the calls of distressed students from the UK’s campuses will continue to go unheard.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
House Republicans Move to Defund OECD Over Global Tax Dispute
Botswana Seeks Controlling Stake in De Beers as Anglo American Prepares Exit
Trump Administration Proposes Repeal of Obama‑Era Endangerment Finding, Dismantling Regulatory Basis for CO₂ Emissions Limits
France Opens Criminal Investigation into X Over Algorithm Manipulation Allegations
A family has been arrested in the UK for displaying the British flag
Mel Gibson refuses to work with Robert De Niro, saying, "Keep that woke clown away from me."
Trump Steamrolls EU in Landmark Trade Win: US–EU Trade Deal Imposes 15% Tariff on European Imports
ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman says people share personal info with ChatGPT but don’t know chats can be used as court evidence in legal cases.
The British propaganda channel BBC News lies again.
Deputy attorney general's second day of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell has concluded
Controversial March in Switzerland Features Men Dressed in Nazi Uniforms
Politics is a good business: Barack Obama’s Reported Net Worth Growth, 1990–2025
Thai Civilian Death Toll Rises to 12 in Cambodian Cross-Border Attacks
TSUNAMI: Trump Just Crossed the Rubicon—And There’s No Turning Back
Over 120 Criminal Cases Dismissed in Boston Amid Public Defender Shortage
UN's Top Court Declares Environmental Protection a Legal Obligation Under International Law
"Crazy Thing": OpenAI's Sam Altman Warns Of AI Voice Fraud Crisis In Banking
The Podcaster Who Accidentally Revealed He Earns Over $10 Million a Year
Trump Announces $550 Billion Japanese Investment and New Trade Agreements with Indonesia and the Philippines
US Treasury Secretary Calls for Institutional Review of Federal Reserve Amid AI‑Driven Growth Expectations
UK Government Considers Dropping Demand for Apple Encryption Backdoor
Severe Flooding in South Korea Claims Lives Amid Ongoing Rescue Operations
Japanese Man Discovers Family Connection Through DNA Testing After Decades of Separation
Russia Signals Openness to Ukraine Peace Talks Amid Escalating Drone Warfare
Switzerland Implements Ban on Mammography Screening
Japanese Prime Minister Vows to Stay After Coalition Loses Upper House Majority
Pogacar Extends Dominance with Stage Fifteen Triumph at Tour de France
CEO Resigns Amid Controversy Over Relationship with HR Executive
Man Dies After Being Pulled Into MRI Machine Due to Metal Chain in New York Clinic
NVIDIA Achieves $4 Trillion Valuation Amid AI Demand
US Revokes Visas of Brazilian Corrupted Judges Amid Fake Bolsonaro Investigation
U.S. Congress Approves Rescissions Act Cutting Federal Funding for NPR and PBS
North Korea Restricts Foreign Tourist Access to New Seaside Resort
Brazil's Supreme Court Imposes Radical Restrictions on Former President Bolsonaro
Centrist Criticism of von der Leyen Resurfaces as she Survives EU Confidence Vote
Judge Criticizes DOJ Over Secrecy in Dropping Charges Against Gang Leader
Apple Closes $16.5 Billion Tax Dispute With Ireland
Von der Leyen Faces Setback Over €2 Trillion EU Budget Proposal
UK and Germany Collaborate on Global Military Equipment Sales
Trump Plans Over 10% Tariffs on African and Caribbean Nations
Flying Taxi CEO Reclaims Billionaire Status After Stock Surge
Epstein Files Deepen Republican Party Divide
Zuckerberg Faces $8 Billion Privacy Lawsuit From Meta Shareholders
FIFA Pressured to Rethink World Cup Calendar Due to Climate Change
SpaceX Nears $400 Billion Valuation With New Share Sale
Microsoft, US Lab to Use AI for Faster Nuclear Plant Licensing
Trump Walks Back Talk of Firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell
Zelensky Reshuffles Cabinet to Win Support at Home and in Washington
"Can You Hit Moscow?" Trump Asked Zelensky To Make Putin "Feel The Pain"
Irish Tech Worker Detained 100 days by US Authorities for Overstaying Visa
×