It’s been a big week for Cambridge. Not in any material sense, of course – the usual to-ing and fro-ing of work continues – but in some important and highly symbolic ways.

The victorious Yes campaign in the CUSU-led referendum billed the creation of a Disabled Students’ Officer position as a “positive step for greater equality and liberation.” Likewise, rainbow flags have flown from flagpoles at colleges across the city this week to mark the beginning of LGBT History Month. As Dominic Cawdell rightly points out, this is a landmark moment for an institution which has historically excluded, and in some ways perhaps continues to exclude, certain groups.

This history of exclusion is still what we find when we report that female academics are struggling to make it to the top of the university’s pay scale, that the university’s own Ethnicity & Diversity Report has found that only 24.4 per cent of undergraduate students are black or from ethnic minorities, or that the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has condemned the fact that not a single pupil eligible for free school meals in Cambridgeshire got a place at either Oxford or Cambridge in 2014.

These aren’t simply problems which have been consigned to the past, the products of years of systematic prejudices (although this is, of course, one side of the coin). These are also real-time issues: we only have to look at the way in which thousands of students seem to have dropped off the electoral register to realise that people are still being denied a voice.

Becoming aware of the problem of exclusion is often a ‘landmark moment’, but it should only ever be seen as a milestone on the way towards further change. Perhaps it would be more helpful if we view the raising of the rainbow flag in Cambridge less as a celebration and more as the raising of a standard – an announcement of the push which needs to follow.

When thinking about these sorts of progressive issues, we often try to figure moments such as the realisation of significant disparities or systematic prejudice as a sort of line in the sand; a turning point after which nothing can be the same again. The crucial thing to remember, though, is that lines in the sand can easily be washed away: without action, change will not stick.

This is precisely the case here. So while we may hail the creation of the Disabled Students’ Officer as a step in the right direction, that’s all it is until someone is elected to that role and begins to enact changes.

So too with LGBT History Month, which is described on its website as being “celebrated in February in the UK,” but comes with the insistence that “work to challenge homophobia, biphobia and transphobia continues throughout the year”.

We might think that such a bold statement of continued campaiging spirit is superfluous – of course LGBT+ people are going to continue campaigning for further recognition and equality! – but it is indeed necessary when faced by the somewhat fantastical impulse to turn every slight change into a big headline, and to transform every victory along the way into the end of the struggle.

This is why we cannot be too celebratory when much remains to be achieved, and why we must be wary of headlines which try to tell us that the ‘change’ we see before us is a grand historic landmark.