At last year's Fresher's Fair I very nearly talked myself into a fistfight with the Palestine Solidarity Society. Having accosted me with the usual, predictable pleasantries, I decided to ignore their kindly overture and instead asked them whether or not they supported terrorism in Gaza. This was perhaps an unwise opening remark. I then received a myriad of memorable scowls, which, I suppose, I had expected. I was, after all, being a gratuitous pain in the arse. And yet, amidst the narrowly missed left-hooks, I felt I had, in some small way, acquired a better understanding of their mentality.

In Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote, the protagonist places himself in the saddle and sallies forth across the arid plains of La Mancha indiscriminately beating up bystanders and robbing barbers. He is unprovoked except by chivalric paranoia and general amusement, and I have long imagined that this is what it must feel like to be an activist. The passion, the glory, the (unlikely) triumph; all that is required is a contrary opinion and a pugilistic life outlook.

As a result, crude oppositionalism is the activists' occupational hazard. But exactly who are these activists? If I were feeling facetious, I might present any ordinary conscript of the Tea Party movement as the model activist. Angry, anti-government, apocalyptic in rhetoric; their choleric brand of solidarity is indistinguishable from your average communist cabal. Closer to home, I might cite the posh kids and their ample trust funds - after all, most of whom seem jolly concerned about the environment and that.

The pattern in these cases is the dilution of principle to mere comfortable contrarianism. In doing so, any activist movement essentially negates its own primary objective because it reduces its moral ambition to a moral analgesic: means become ends, protest is undergone for the sake of protest itself. This redundancy of aims often produces fanaticism, and fanatics break but they do not bend. Indeed, to borrow Santayana's definition, they redouble their efforts just when they lose sight of their aims.

They may also become comically inept. Last January, the Cambridge Gaza Solidarity group staged a weekend sit-in at the Law Faculty to show support for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. I might point out to you that Law has perhaps the only properly heated faculty on the Sidgwick site, and the weekend is a period of partial closure for many of the departments. How valiant! Don Quixote would be proud.

But the activist bandwagon rolls on regardless, and now a new crusade has been found: university spending cuts. One can almost hear the sound of palms being rubbed: here, at last, is a cause that concerns everyone at Cambridge. We can but hope that the coming years see a principled approach taken towards this issue, and not merely activism for the sake of opposition.