Cowards and mountebanks”: not the way theologians belonging to a world-leading university department are accustomed to hearing themselves described.

Cowards and mountebanks”: not the way theologians belonging to a world-leading university department are accustomed to hearing themselves described. These accusations, hurled at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity by Jordan Peterson a few weeks ago, expressed his outrage at the withdrawal of the fellowship he had been offered after photographs of him posing beside a self-announced “Islamophobe” had been circulated. Universities have been a longstanding target of Peterson’s polemic. “Scratch the most clever postmodern-relativist professor,” he proposes, and you will see how quickly “the cloak of radical tolerance comes off”.

Peterson’s charge – that higher education is a bastion of the liberal left, in which the boundaries of acceptable opinion are ferociously policed in the name of a “tolerance” that is anything but – is not so far-fetched. His treatment by the DivFac at Cambridge resembles that received by several others: British sociologist Noah Carl; Oxford professor Nigel Biggar; Germaine Greer, and so on.

I myself look over my shoulder when I teach natural law to an audience that includes self-identifying gay people or the ethics of abortion to women who may have had one, or when I present a critical angle on “evolution” when that theory is seen as the determining narrative of human nature. In the current climate, academic debate represents an ever narrower range of opinion.

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