Behind the Times

British values, as our Head Boy recently proclaimed, do not include free speech or leaving people alone just because they haven't done anything illegal. Accordingly, Britain's Head Boy has been tale-tattling in Big School about radical students who continue to defy his programme of cultural cleansing. A London university has responded with some asperity to the Head Boy's accusation that it played host to extremist preachers, although it is certainly true that the preachers in question spoke against such long-cherished British values as usury. The heretical university is the School of Oriental and African Studies, which apparently believes that there is more to the world of wogs than plotting to privatise their water or encouraging their children into the local equivalent of National Service. The university's insistence on information and definition over the question of what constitutes a "hate or extremist speaker" only serves to confirm that, even today, there is a long, hard way to go before the taint of evidence-based thinking is fully expunged from higher education.