Is a keffiyeh really an appropriate outfit for a Cambridge University ceremony?

Spectator

26-07-2025

Cambridge University's decision to honour the rap artist Stormzy with an honorary doctorate seemed odd. New universities, rather than our ancient ones, like to parade icons of popular culture.
When the decision was announced a few months ago, I was asked by a national newspaper to write a piece questioning his nomination. I demurred, because Stormzy was being rewarded for generous benefactions that aimed to bring disadvantaged black schoolchildren to Cambridge University – despite my doubts about reserving scholarships for particular ethnic groups. Stormzy's honorary doctorate dominated the headlines – and so, none of us really noticed who else was on the list. Looking back, it is almost as if a smokescreen was being created to let through someone far more controversial than the two-times winner of the Best Grime Act.
An official photo of the awardees, enrobed in doctoral scarlet, has just been released. Vice-Chancellor Deborah 'call me Debbie' Prentice is seated next to Stormzy. Behind her, adorned with a keffiyeh, stands the American radical Angela Davis.
One can pass over Ms, or should one say Dr, Davis's predictable loyalties in the Middle East, while still asking whether it is appropriate for her or anyone else to wear a political badge in an official photo of this sort, and, more importantly, whether Cambridge acted responsibly in releasing it across the globe. More to the point is the simple question why Angela Davis is thought to be a suitable recipient of such an honour in the first place. It cannot be because she is descended from the Cambridge graduate William Brewster, who centuries ago sailed to North America on the Mayflower.
If there is an answer, it may lie in the encomium written by the University Orator. It is a toe-curling document, particularly in the translation from Latin, which is all most people will be able to read. Understandably it lays stress on the appalling treatment of black people that she witnessed as a child in America; but it then turns to the occasions when she has suffered persecution because of her staunch adherence to communist beliefs.
If we believe in freedom of speech we do have to tolerate those who express such beliefs. But to hold her up as a model of free speech taunts the rest of us: she was long a stalwart of a party that failed to speak out against the often violent repression of political opponents in the Soviet Union (from which she obtained the so-called Lenin Peace Prize); and she received a degree in the (so-called) German Democratic Republic. Davis studied there during the years when its government was second within eastern Europe only to Albania in the strictness of its repression. Indeed, the Lenin Peace Prize is even mentioned in her Cambridge citation – a slap in the face to all my colleagues who have experienced the regime in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Some years ago, King's College, Cambridge showed great insensitivity by hanging a painting of the Soviet flag in its bar. Davis's citation puts that painting in the shade.
So here are some excerpts from a document that quite simply brings shame on Cambridge University:
'IT IS WITH joy and reverence that your Orator presents to you this woman of erudition and eloquence, whose very name is synonymous with the long and bitter struggle for all people to enjoy without fear equality of rights and freedoms, regardless of class, of colour and of gender… How worthy they are, who defend freedom of speech only as long as they agree with what is said!… Taught, then, by her own experience, on behalf of those the world over who lack their own voice and defence, she resolutely defends justice, she tirelessly opposes slavery, with almost divine strength she fights on behalf of liberty… In this present age, when we see civic virtues and the very foundations of civil society faltering under the attacks of billionaires, when the foul stench of fascism rises again across the globe, who could blame even the staunchest lover of liberty for feeling despondent?… She shows us that it is possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar and a revolutionary.'
Davis may, nonetheless, be offended. She is described as 'eloquent'. I have been warned by the equally radical Professor Priyamvada Gopal (the one with views about Winston Churchill) that I was wrong to praise David Olusoga on one occasion as 'eloquent', as the word is apparently seen by ethnic minorities as condescending.
That apart, we have to ask whether she has ever criticised the appalling abuse of human rights and the suppression of free speech in the Soviet Union. One of her critics who attended school in the Soviet Union has described her as a 'Soviet propaganda icon' in those days. And although she studied Kant under the philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno she is clearly not being awarded her honorary degree on the grounds of scholarly attainment comparable to those figures.
I have served on the Honorary Degree Committee in the past and have been impressed by the care and thoughtfulness given to each nomination, and by the sheer amount of detail about the nominees. Alas, the online page listing current members of this committee has been taken down for 'maintenance', but it is hard to escape the conclusion that places on the committee have been hi-jacked by those who prefer activists to real academics. As for the Orator, he really should know that his task is to address the whole University and the world beyond, and not just like-minded folk. Perhaps, though, he was acting under orders and does not believe anything that he said. He is the author of a learned article entitled 'Bulls' testicles and Mycenaean onomastics', and conceivably his encomium is, if not bull's testicles, deliberate bullsh*t.