Universities’ most freakish, isolated minority: non-lefties. Like Catholics in Elizabethan times, they must congregate discreetly. By James Delingpole, who recently took part in a debates at Oxford and Cambridge Universities on refugees, which they lost big time, by about 90% to 10%.

Has anyone ever attempted to quantify just how incorrigibly leftwards our great universities have drifted in the past decade or so? …

In the bar afterwards I met five out of the total of 14 undergraduates I calculated had voted for us. One — as a gesture of defiance — was dressed in cords, tweed jacket and Viyella shirt. Thirty years ago, people with their politics would have been, while not the majority, at least part of a sizeable minority. Today, they could scarcely have seemed more freakish and isolated if they’d turned up in doublet and hose.

Except that that analogy doesn’t fully capture the prejudice they suffer. Like Catholics in Elizabethan England, they must congregate discreetly, only expressing their faith openly when they can be sure they are in like-minded company. The persecution isn’t always overt, at least not in Cambridge. But there’s little doubt that they’re the one group which doesn’t get the perk of special privileges for its minority status. …

It’s not the doctrinaire left-wingery that’s the problem so much as the closed-mindedness that goes with it. My side’s speeches weren’t at all bad; certainly a lot more eloquent, lucid and factually accurate than the opposition’s. But I’ve no doubt that even had we combined the oratory of Churchill with the wit of Oscar Wilde and the brilliance of Einstein, we would still have lost by about the same 90 to ten ratio. …

If you’re representing the liberal-left side on any given proposition, then frankly you could fart your way, badly, through the telephone directory and still be greeted like Caesar dragging Vercingetorix through Rome in chains.

hat-tip Stephen Neil