Are we witnessing a change of direction, which perhaps risks going too far in some cases? “This could easily be a negative overreaction, a way of overcompensating for past injustices,” says Professor McMahan.

But there’s also a problem, he says, with students feeling “very self-righteous” about their moral views. “They seem to think that they somehow know the truth about things and that anyone who disagrees with their views must be evil.”

Although he describes himself as politically left-wing and takes many of the same positions on issues as the censoring students, he departs on one important point: “I don’t think we should treat everyone who disagrees with us is evil.”

Professor McMahan knows what it’s like to fall foul of cancel culture, after all. A critic of Israel, he was asked to withdraw from his lecture at the American University of Beirut in 2018 after someone checked his CV and discovered that he was an advisor to the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was still present and was arrested for 20 minutes.

“They thought I was a bad guy and shouldn’t be allowed to speak,” he said. “This shows that it is present everywhere, not just in Europe and the United States.”

The Oxbridge cases, however, attract particular attention. This may be due to the special place these universities hold in the British psyche and the fact that their unions recruit such prestigious lecturers. When an argument breaks out, the company takes note.

But some Oxbridge graduates suggest that elite institutions may also be inherently more susceptible to this new form of moral censorship. “It’s a growing problem at Oxbridge because people are passionate, intelligent and driven, which distorts and exaggerates all social trends,” says Alfie.

The college system means that university life can be cloistered and intimate. Perhaps more than elsewhere, everyone knows your job and hiding places are rare. “Whereas at other universities you’ll have friends in the hall that you room with, the Oxbridge college system forces people to cluster together,” says the Peterhouse graduate.

“People who go to Oxbridge think of themselves as brilliant and intelligent, so overestimate their intellectual abilities and their own righteousness. Universities are so concerned with making it clear that students are always right that they perpetuate these self-appointed crusades for morality that are potentially ridiculous to any adult, but to students, it’s their whole life.

Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, 24, believes he too has experienced the consequences of such a culture. While reading law at Trinity College, Cambridge, he submitted an article to the student newspaper in which he criticized what he claims was a campus culture of “lowering the threshold of proof” and avoiding those who would have transgressed in the absence of proven wrongdoing. . “It can destroy lives,” he says. “Not only will they become social outcasts, but they will also have difficulty finding employment in the future. »

But Kardos-Nyheim says the newspaper’s students deemed his writings “inflammatory” and rejected them. “They refused to publish the article, which I think reveals something insidious, which is that they don’t want to tolerate any point of view on this particular issue,” he says.