After several years in which Cambridge has tended to languish just behind Oxford in UK university rankings, Cantabs will be pleased to know that they have finally topped at least one league table: the Radical Progressive University Guide.

The guide is published by Civitas, a think-tank described by The Times as “right of centre”, as part of a series of briefings about “the new academic radicalism”.

It does not seem particularly keen to congratulate Cambridge on this addition to its CV. The report strikes a somewhat apocalyptic tone, opening with a quote from the Book of Proverbs: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

The Daily Mail has been similarly concerned. On the report’s publication, they ran an article declaring: “Half of our universities peddle their woke agenda to students”

They went on to quote Sir John Hayes, a senior backbench Tory MP, as saying: “Universities should be places of light and liberty learning, but a dark shadow has fallen over too much of higher education”, adding a penchant for alliteration to the report’s Biblical flair.

The report’s methodology explains that its results were generated by trawling University websites and news reports for references to “‘trigger warnings’, ‘content warnings’ or ‘content notes’, ‘white privilege’, and ‘anti-racism training’ or official ‘anti-racist’ guidance”. These were then totted up and used to produce the table.

The report’s conclusion, however, is a little more fiery than the average mathematical report. It reads: “British universities are clearly in a sorry state, being politically monocultured and unmoored from the general population”.

Warming to his theme, the author slips into nostalgia for a pre-industrial past: “For many of my parents’ generation, their first job was picking potatoes at harvest time.

“Today, their grandchildren are in university possibly pondering Foucault and Derrida, while fruit and vegetable picking are either mechanised or done by foreign labourers, with mass immigration fuelling division and depopulation and labour shortages in poorer countries.”

Students at Cambridge might not be inclined to accept that the University is ‘monocultured’. Indeed, last term saw the culture wars visit its hallowed buildings and cobbled streets with more fury than ever, as the debate over trans rights spilled over into Cambridge life.

Although Cambridge’s political culture is undoubtedly to the left of the national one, debates by the student Labour, Liberal, and Conservative associations are all popular, and involve a substantial range of opinions. Though most academics are undoubtedly left-wing, figures like David Abulafia and Arif Ahmed feature prominently in the Tory-supporting press.

Civitas’ report warns that universities’ politicisation “threaten[s] the standards of evidence, reason and freedom of inquiry they are grounded upon”.

Seeing the think tank write off the nation’s best institutions of higher learning as dangerously radical because their websites mention a handful of semi-arbitrary buzzwords too frequently, however, you might be forgiven for wondering if universities are the only places where the culture wars are getting the better of academic rigour.