Saturday’s Times reported that a Cambridge under-graduate has gone into hiding in a safe-house after receiving threats for having recently reproduced in a weekly satirical college flysheet one of the notorious Danish cartoons of Muhammad, along with a highly deprecatory remark about the prophet, albeit one some serious thinkers consider to be warranted, however misguidedly .
It also reported that, as well as dissociating itself from, and condemning, republication of the cartoon and publication of the comment, the student’s college is also beginning an investigation and disciplinary measures to determine whether he should be sent down for what he had done.
One can understand the college’s desire to avoid violent protests against both the student as well as itself, sad though it be for the country to have found itself in a situation where, for something seemingly so comparatively trivial, such grave consequences are thought liable to follow.
Should the college have announced it is considering whether to send the student down only as a way of taking the immediate heat out of the situation until tempers cool, then its decision would be understandable. However, if it seriously considering sending the student dfown, even if he was in breach of some student code of conduct, its decision would represent a most serious and ill-advised restriction on freedom of thought and expression in one of the country’s oldest seats of learning.
It was bad enough when British newspapers refused to republish the cartoons when world-wide protests about them became a major new item. But for a Cambridge college to take such draconian action for a student having done so in one of its flysheets is much worse. What next? Will it be withdrawing copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses from its library and other texts that have been known to offend Muslims?
It is one thing for British faith schools not to be allowed to teach deprecatory views about adherents of other faiths to their young charges. It is altogether another for a single undergraduate to publish a view adherents of a faith would find offensive.