The Daily Telegraph has today issued a second correction to an article published in October which incorrectly reported on calls to include more non-white authors in the English curriculum.

Today's correction explicitly cleared Lola Olufemi, the CUSU Women's Officer, saying, “An Oct 25 article incorrectly stated that Lola Olufemi had written an open letter on “Decolonising” the English Faculty in which she and co-signatories called for Cambridge University to replace white authors with black writers on course reading lists.

“In fact, the letter called only for black authors to be included, not for white writers to be replaced. We are sorry for this error.”

In a tweet, Olufemi criticised the Telegraph’s “feeble and inadequate” apology, insisting that the campaign must continue despite “blatant intellectual dishonesty”.

The Daily Telegraph originally published a large picture of Olufemi on its front page, which led to widespread criticism that the paper was inappropriately targeting her. The photograph was captioned ‘Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors’, and the accompanying article erroneously claimed that the decolonisation campaign was calling for white authors to be removed from reading lists in favour of black writers.

The Telegraph initially issued an apology the day after its original article in October and did not mention Olufemi by name. In it, the paper corrected its claim that the University will be “forced to replace white authors with black writers”.

In response to the article, the University at the time filed a complaint to the press regulator IPSO. Minutes from a University Council meeting in November noted the General Board of Faculties’ view of the “abhorrence of the targeting of an undergraduate student by two notable national newspapers”. A spokesperson for IPSO confirmed to Varsity that the regulator was in the process of handling a complaint relating to the Telegraph article, but was unable to provide further comment due to confidentiality procedures.

Over 100 academics also came to the defence of Olufemi, co-signing a statement of solidarity. The statement condemned the “deliberately misleading and racially inflammatory” coverage of the campaign to ‘decolonise’ Cambridge’s English Tripos.

Tamsin Starr, a Cambridge University communications manager, tweeted the most recent correction, praising the University’s role in “defending our students against misrepresentation in the media”.

This article was updated on 15th December to include IPSO's response to a Varsity comment request