Universities are getting it hot and strong just now from the national press and from Westminster. Cambridge University, where I work, is singled out by the Daily Mail as a “remainer” bastion, seducing impressionable young minds away from the pure milk of Brexit’s truth. Its slumbering quadrangles and ivy-choked towers are under threat, we read: “Just why is every new Oxbridge head a leftie?” the paper asks, in a full-page gallery in which I and a dozen others are listed.

Oh yes, and in other news we are cravenly giving in to bullying by students who want to decolonise the English faculty, dunking Milton, Keats and Dickens in the wintry Cam.

Also in the past week a Tory whip wants names and packdrills about who’s teaching what about Brexit – prompting cries of “McCarthyism” and even, from the chancellor of Oxford University, Chris Patten, of “idiotic Leninism”. And Oxford and Cambridge are chided for not admitting enough black students by Labour’s David Lammy. Goodness. Where to begin?

Probably with academic freedom and intellectual liberty. Far from Cambridge being a socialist monoculture, many of its leading characters are thoroughly and deeply conservative. And there are classical liberals, and Greens and Blairites, and Corbynistas. Among them there is lively debate. We don’t agree. Nor should we. Our whole purpose is to thrash through ideas.

But second, and there is no getting around this, Cambridge as an area voted heavily to remain in the EU, and the university has a strongly international feel. Among the 400 students in my college we are proud to count 62 different nationalities, and 40% of our student body are from the rest of the EU. When people here talk about “the rights of European citizens” it isn’t abstract. They are talking about their partners, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

I’m writing here in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the university, but it’s clear that most of the main faculties and departments are worried: about whether they will still be able to attract the very best minds from across the continent after Brexit; about research funding; and about joint projects that may come to an end. This has nothing to do with ideology. This is about the bread and butter business of higher education. Does it need saying that individuals and institutions should be able to argue in their own interest without being accused of treason?

Let’s all calm down, can we? Cambridge doesn’t have a shred of influence on how the government conducts negotiations

So let’s all calm down, can we? Cambridge University doesn’t have a shred of influence on how the government conducts its Brexit negotiations. All the serried ranks of all the academics across the UK have much less impact on how MPs vote than do, for instance, the very same newspapers having a go at us.

Yet anyone who thinks mainstream politics and the details of how we exit the EU excite the same level of interest among students as they do in newsrooms or Westminster thinktanks is, frankly, bonkers. If only. The students seem much more interested in gender, identity and environmental issues than Brexit. When it comes to the mainstream political agenda, compared to the 1970s or 80s, this is a remarkably unpolitical place.

These things go in waves. Back then, there really was a revolutionary left on British campuses – but there was also a powerful rightwing intellectual movement. Peterhouse, here at Cambridge, was a centre of Thatcherite thinking before she became prime minister – with Maurice Cowling, Roger Scruton, and the pervasive influence of Thatcher’s favourite philosopher, Michael Oakeshott. I’d hazard a guess that, somewhere here today, future intellectual leaders of the right, as well as the left, are quietly burrowing away in some library. It’s an intensely argumentative but intensely plural environment.

That takes me back to this attempt to decolonise the English faculty, in which students have called for the curriculum to include more black and minority ethnic writers. Again, let’s get real. Students have always criticised their courses, and those who teach them. Part of their role is to look askance at whatever they are being told. And in the true spirit of academic open-mindedness, lecturers will likely listen to complaints, read letters of protest, and think a bit before replying.

This isn’t scary. This is being a university. Though I have no influence over the English faculty at all, I can confidently promise that deceased white men will continue to feature very prominently on its very long reading lists. We will continue to be a place that demands ferociously hard work and high academic rigour; and everything will follow from that.

Finally, let me come to the charge that I, like a cluster of colleagues, am a leftwing infiltrator taking over the university. Knowing the individuals personally, I’d say that perhaps eight or nine of the heads of the 31 colleges here are mostly or somewhat on the left – so a modest minority (the Mail’s list includes people labelled left for merely working at the BBC).

But, more important, anyone who thinks a college head has any influence over what’s taught, or how lecturers lecture, or indeed what professors profess, simply doesn’t understand the system. If I tried to impose any view of my own on any of my academic colleagues, I’d get a long, cold stare and much disdain. Which is rather how I felt when I picked up some of the press this week.

• Jackie Ashley is president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge