Kesaia Toganivalu is a former Treasurer of the Oxford Union and Political Officer of the Oxford University Conservative Association. She later served as adviser to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
You don’t need to go to Bali to find yourself. A surprising amount of self-discovery can happen on the mean streets of Bristol, Birmingham or Liverpool. Or, indeed, at almost any British university. If you let it.
The beginning of this academic year has already seen right-wing activists touring campuses, clip-farming confrontations with their opponents. Some encounters have descended into spats, accompanied by the predictable exchange of epithets.
The battle is taking place within universities too. At my alma mater, Oxford, the registration of a new Reform Society has already caused controversy on campus. Universities should be safe places to study, but that does not mean you should be safe from ideas you disagree with.
I arrived at university considerably more intellectually sheltered. I was from central London, attended a competitive state school, and had done my time attending various protests. Fresher Kesaia would likely have been completely disgusted by my later antics holding office within the university Conservative club. I simply had not been exposed to others who held different views on immigration, class, the state and even where free speech bled into hate speech.
There are limits, of course. We have laws governing speech, and universities have their own rules intended to protect students. But your lecturers cannot hawkishly monitor every conversation you have. At some point, you must discern and decide for yourself where those boundaries lie.
By the time I was in my final year, I thought I had heard it all. I would chair the weekly, partly comedic, debates every Sunday at ‘Port & Policy’ and make sure I kept my wits about me. Part of the responsibility of being chair, besides using a port bottle as a gavel, is knowing when to kick somebody off the stage. Much like being ‘cut off’ at your favourite drinking establishment, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.
The test for whether someone needed to be shoved off the stage wasn’t whether I personally disagreed with them. Because where would the fun be in that?
There is something quite British about being able to disagree profoundly, argue about it, and then carry on. Our universities, debating societies, pubs and Parliament have all, in their very different ways, provided spaces for exactly that. We should regard the ability to argue freely and civilly not as something frightening, but as a privilege.
And university gives you an unusual amount of that privilege. For a few years, you are surrounded by people with the time and inclination to argue about almost everything. You have societies devoted to every political persuasion, speakers passing through campus, libraries full of things you have never read, and people living down the corridor who may see the world completely differently from you.
Use it.
Join the strange society. Go to the event that sounds faintly horrifying. If you are on the left, talk to the Tory or Reform student before deciding what they believe. If you are on the right, don’t spend three years congratulating yourself for being a contrarian. Go and listen to the socialists too.
At Oxford we were spoilt for choice. Liberation & Liquor on Monday with the Feminist Society; Champagne (though often prosecco) & Socialism on Tuesday with, you guessed it, the socialists; Spirited Discussion on Wednesday, with the Liberal Democrats; and Port & Policy with the Conservatives on Sunday. Yes, cheap alcohol was a seductive offering, but so too was hearing what everyone else had to say.
The marketplace of ideas inevitably contains some bad ones. Some will offend you, and others will simply be stupid. You might listen to someone for twenty minutes and come away entirely convinced that you were right about them in the first place. Fine. At least you gave them twenty minutes.
We spend a lot of time discussing whether universities protect free speech, but not nearly enough talking about whether we’re empowering students to use it. Fresher Kesaia would probably find some of my opinions today appalling.
I would probably find some of hers exhausting. I am glad we are not the same person.
You may leave university with exactly the same politics you arrived with. But they should at least have been tested.
It is a privilege to live somewhere where disagreement can end in an argument rather than fear, and to spend several years somewhere designed, at its best, for exactly that purpose. You don’t need to go to Bali to find yourself. Talk to someone you disagree with. Risk being offended. Better still, risk being wrong.
Kesaia Toganivalu is a former Treasurer of the Oxford Union and Political Officer of the Oxford University Conservative Association. She later served as adviser to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
You don’t need to go to Bali to find yourself. A surprising amount of self-discovery can happen on the mean streets of Bristol, Birmingham or Liverpool. Or, indeed, at almost any British university. If you let it.
The beginning of this academic year has already seen right-wing activists touring campuses, clip-farming confrontations with their opponents. Some encounters have descended into spats, accompanied by the predictable exchange of epithets.
The battle is taking place within universities too. At my alma mater, Oxford, the registration of a new Reform Society has already caused controversy on campus. Universities should be safe places to study, but that does not mean you should be safe from ideas you disagree with.
I arrived at university considerably more intellectually sheltered. I was from central London, attended a competitive state school, and had done my time attending various protests. Fresher Kesaia would likely have been completely disgusted by my later antics holding office within the university Conservative club. I simply had not been exposed to others who held different views on immigration, class, the state and even where free speech bled into hate speech.
There are limits, of course. We have laws governing speech, and universities have their own rules intended to protect students. But your lecturers cannot hawkishly monitor every conversation you have. At some point, you must discern and decide for yourself where those boundaries lie.
By the time I was in my final year, I thought I had heard it all. I would chair the weekly, partly comedic, debates every Sunday at ‘Port & Policy’ and make sure I kept my wits about me. Part of the responsibility of being chair, besides using a port bottle as a gavel, is knowing when to kick somebody off the stage. Much like being ‘cut off’ at your favourite drinking establishment, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.
The test for whether someone needed to be shoved off the stage wasn’t whether I personally disagreed with them. Because where would the fun be in that?
There is something quite British about being able to disagree profoundly, argue about it, and then carry on. Our universities, debating societies, pubs and Parliament have all, in their very different ways, provided spaces for exactly that. We should regard the ability to argue freely and civilly not as something frightening, but as a privilege.
And university gives you an unusual amount of that privilege. For a few years, you are surrounded by people with the time and inclination to argue about almost everything. You have societies devoted to every political persuasion, speakers passing through campus, libraries full of things you have never read, and people living down the corridor who may see the world completely differently from you.
Use it.
Join the strange society. Go to the event that sounds faintly horrifying. If you are on the left, talk to the Tory or Reform student before deciding what they believe. If you are on the right, don’t spend three years congratulating yourself for being a contrarian. Go and listen to the socialists too.
At Oxford we were spoilt for choice. Liberation & Liquor on Monday with the Feminist Society; Champagne (though often prosecco) & Socialism on Tuesday with, you guessed it, the socialists; Spirited Discussion on Wednesday, with the Liberal Democrats; and Port & Policy with the Conservatives on Sunday. Yes, cheap alcohol was a seductive offering, but so too was hearing what everyone else had to say.
The marketplace of ideas inevitably contains some bad ones. Some will offend you, and others will simply be stupid. You might listen to someone for twenty minutes and come away entirely convinced that you were right about them in the first place. Fine. At least you gave them twenty minutes.
We spend a lot of time discussing whether universities protect free speech, but not nearly enough talking about whether we’re empowering students to use it. Fresher Kesaia would probably find some of my opinions today appalling.
I would probably find some of hers exhausting. I am glad we are not the same person.
You may leave university with exactly the same politics you arrived with. But they should at least have been tested.
It is a privilege to live somewhere where disagreement can end in an argument rather than fear, and to spend several years somewhere designed, at its best, for exactly that purpose. You don’t need to go to Bali to find yourself. Talk to someone you disagree with. Risk being offended. Better still, risk being wrong.