Is Cambridge even pretending to be objective these days? The question occurred to me a few weeks ago when, speaking at a dinner for the Cambridge University Conservative Association, I fell into conversation with a planet-brained undergraduate historian. He had got in on his second attempt, he said. The first time around, he had stumbled at the interview. The tutor, in rather a classic Oxbridge way, had pulled out a sugar cube and asked him what he thought.

Rather impressively, to my mind, the sixth-former spoke about the way in which trade knitted together previously remote places in the early modern period. He expatiated on the rise of consumerism. He used the move from beet to cane as an example of globalisation transforming landscapes. He described recent shifts in lifestyle that were making sugar cubes rarer. The tutor looked on impatiently, eventually bursting in with, “So nothing about slavery?”

“It was my fault, really,” the young historian told me in an apologetic tone. “I ought to have researched her views beforehand. I took a gap year and applied again, but this time I was careful to avoid Marxist dons.”

Between 1856 and 1871, Cambridge repealed the various rules that had discriminated against non-Anglicans. But it now seems be introducing a new and unofficial Test Act, one based on politics rather than religion. Once again, the effect is to keep out clever people with the wrong convictions.

Consider the sacking of Dr Noah Carl, a sociologist dismissed by St Edmund’s College after a petition by Left-wing academics who accused him of “racist pseudoscience” after he defended the right of academics to investigate the genetic basis of IQ. Note that Dr Carl was not himself advancing any conclusions on the subject. All he was arguing was that scholars should be allowed to follow their research even if it led to uncomfortable places. Yet, incredibly, making the case for academic freedom is itself now treated as a thoughtcrime.

Carl’s sacking followed the withdrawal of a visiting fellowship for the acclaimed Canadian academic Jordan Peterson on essentially the same grounds: a Corbynista mob had demanded it. In both cases, the authorities defended their decisions on grounds of “inclusivity”. Yes, they actually used that word, without evident irony or self-awareness.