Cambridge’s student journalists are uniquely privileged by our university’s huge profile. Stories we break at Varsity often find significance at a national level, frequently making the pages of the mainstream press. Just last term, a student choir was backed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, an ex-home secretary visited the pro-Palestine encampment, and the University was drawn into a free speech row over a ‘race realist’ research fellow. There is no better training for a wannabe journalist, as I have come to find over more than a year at this newspaper. The heightened media attention Cambridge receives speaks not only to its position in this country, but also to a series of crises playing out at universities across the UK.

“Politicians and commentators are using universities as a rehearsal space for their agendas”

One of the first lessons I learned as a student journalist, during my first term at Varsity, was that the University and its students cannot be pulled apart into two distinct, warring sides. Last year’s Marking and Assessment Boycott and the UCU’s campaign for better contracts for supervisors made clear that students are not the only group pushing for change within this institution. This has become all the more apparent recently, when academics have at times led, in close partnership with students, the campaign for Cambridge to cut ties with Israel. As UK higher education faces a cash “catastrophe” which could put thousands of jobs on the chopping block and see top universities become the “preserve of privileged elites,” headlines must not pit a monolithic institution against an anonymous student mass.

Cambridge’s huge international visibility means that stories playing out here are often pulled into wider debates from a surprisingly long range. At the beginning of mine and my co-editor’s tenure, we published an article on Fitzwilliam College cleaners’ bizarre practice of sharing photos of students’ messy rooms, thinking it nothing more than a light-hearted piece for the start of term. We were surprised when the story made the pages of The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Independent (even prompting further investigation in the lattermost), but nothing short of bewildered when this was followed by multiple columnists’ furious takedowns of Cambridge students’ supposed “immoral” lack of cleanliness. “It’s all very well having a brilliant mind, but cleanliness is a moral duty,” intoned the Telegraph’s William Sitwell. While the strange response this story provoked could be attributed to an opportunistic desire to weigh in on the ‘students are layabouts’ stereotype (evidenced by the Fresh Meat screen grab that heads the Independent’s piece), I believe it speaks to a recent trend for politicians and commentators to use universities, particularly those with Cambridge’s visibility, as a rehearsal space for their agendas. Getting the grades to win a place at Cambridge is viewed as sufficient consent to be subjected to moral judgments which have far less to do with individual students than with the history and profile of the university they happen to attend.

“Braverman’s inability to engage with students was a clear signal from the Cambridge community, rejecting its use as a political football”

Nothing exemplified this trend more than when, on a Thursday morning in May, Suella Braverman came to town. Flanked by GB News anchor Patrick Christys and a host of cameramen and producers, the former home secretary paced up and down King’s Parade looking for someone to talk to. Student members of the Cambridge for Palestine encampment, passing residents, and tourists all refused. After the MP told Varsity that she believes campus protests to be antisemitic, Cambridge Jews for Justice told us that Jewish identities are being “weaponised” by politicians. Whether Braverman intended to meaningfully engage with students or not, the fact that she failed to do so was a clear signal from the Cambridge community, rejecting its use as a political football.

Cambridge’s uneasy position in the national free speech debate similarly reflects the harm that can be done by treating a university and its students as mere examples in an argument. Take the case of Nathan Cofnas, a research fellow who claimed that Black people would “disappear” from “almost all high profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” in a meritocracy. The ease with which this story slid into a debate over free speech, attracting outside figures including Peter Singer, epitomises the danger of real cases and real people (the students who might be terrified to inhabit the same university as Cofnas) being treated as thought experiments in an indefatigable culture war.

While Cambridge won’t go bankrupt anytime soon, this university faces just as many pitfalls as any other, as its inflated position in society often leaves its students, and staff, at risk of being flattened and misrepresented to score political points. The clicks to be gained by pundits mean that they’re unlikely to drop this strategy any time soon, but it’s just as unlikely that students will give up resisting it.