It seems typical of the Cambridge spirit to kick up a fuss whenever is humanly possible, and the almighty cacophony heard during the Dominic Strauss-Kahn farce seems to show just how ridiculous students here can be.  As one side happily chooses to spit at the faces of union cronies and security guards merely doing their job, and the other chooses to defend an alleged sex offender and to turn the debate into anti-feminist, anti-left wing hate speech, there seems far too little room for a third way, of little opinion at all.

Fighting their keyboard warrior battles on The Tab and Facebook, ambivalence seems to not be a possible option; either you are supporting worldwide rape, or you are a loony lefty proto-fascist who wants an end to free speech. Whilst one might expect such black and white thinking in the likes of tabloids and general public debate, instead it is coming from the students of the supposed best university in the world, and it seems that the situation with DSK symbolises much of the problem with Cambridge.

Cambridge seems to foster this sort of response to events, as the sickly inward feel and self-obsession within the town combine with reactionary students who want to get angry about something (the hypocrisy being that I went from ambivalence to anger about the actual debate).  The fight for who can be the best moral crusader is beyond irritating on the part of the protestors, and the others trying to assert their ridiculous superiority complex by claiming that this is part of the ‘hypocrisy’ of student activists is equally futile. The constant fighting and competition over something relatively fruitless is to be expected from many students here, seeming to lack any grounding in the real world and over issues that genuinely matter. If you want to tackle rape, there are bigger and more important things to do than to be somehow ‘against’ this one man; if you want to suggest that those protesting against it are somehow fighting free speech and show how all lefties are supposedly hypocritical with their arguments, then you are missing the point of the protests and are just as stereotypically simpleminded as the other side.  Whilst in one breath Cambridge students are happy to laud their superiority as the public were ‘duped’ by the Kony 2012 campaign (http://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/4573), in the next they are acting irrationally like a mob, or reacting bitterly against the protests, to show how morally superior they are.

With both sides forcing their collective simplistic middle-class assumptions on the world, perhaps a dose of realism is necessary: that protesting against the man due to his crimes is fully acceptable, but that he was never going to be stopped and that the police were going to ensure the event was going to happen no matter what. With this in mind, whilst it seems somewhat distasteful for him to speak given the pending case, knowing that it was going to happen anyway it was better to do nothing at all. This would mean no publicity for DSK, in turn making it unlikely he would be invited to any other talks around the country since this will no doubt set a precedent; and also no publicity for the insensitive and ridiculously attention-seeking Cambridge Union Society.

Consistently choosing its speakers based on how it can get in the Daily Mail rather than how it can please its members, the union never fails to act more idiotically than its last stunt; sadly this article, like the rest of them, just feeds it attention once more, meaning next year yet more gullible freshers will pay the exorbitant membership fees, having seen the presence all over the media. 

I felt a perverse sense of pride appeared as my college, King’s, were very well-represented during the debacle:  whether that’s two students being arrested in the run up to due to ‘vandalism’ (http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/4589), a fellow historian writing an article for the Guardian against his speech (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/09/dominique-strauss-kahn-cambridge-visit?INTCMP=SRCH), or the one and only counter-protestor (http://www.prensalibre.com/internacional/defiende-derecho-DSK-hablar-Cambridge_PREIMA20120309_0216_11.jpg). However, I also felt a strong distancing – they all seem to miss the point, which is that this was a storm in a teacup and the constant need to make an issue out of everything is simply out of proportion in the wider scheme of things. That Cambridge engenders debate is fantastic, but it would be better if it were over larger matters that were not self-defeating and frankly annoying to view from a distance; it would be nice if not having an opinion on the matter at all was more socially acceptable as well.