I recently visited Trinity College at Cambridge University. I was based in London, so I took the “fast train” from Euston Train Station at Russell Square.  The fast train simply means that the train does not stop on the way. It takes a little more than an hour to arrive. Part of the pleasure of the journey is that you get to see from your window bedroom communities, quaint-looking small towns, farms, and the English countryside, something that is hard to conjure up when you are London-based.  The countryside is still there and so are the people who live there because these were the citizens who voted to leave the European Union. These days, they do not have much of a voice among the London academic and media establishment. One day I would like to spend time among them and hear what they really have to say about the future of Britain.  Instead, I was on my way for a collegial meeting with a retired Cambridge professor of Ethnomusicology, as I am on a long-term quest to explore the writings of Eric Werner, a Viennese Jewish refugee from Hitler who during the war years in New York City wrote a book called The Sacred Bridge, where he argues for the Jewish origins of Catholic Plain Chant or what we call Gregorian Chant. The meeting went well. There are 29 colleges at Cambridge. I would like to think that they all share a certain magic. They often have castle-like entrances. You cannot just walk in. You must check in with the porters to be allowed entrance. Once you do, you usually enter an enormous quad or internal courtyard.  Usually there is an old chapel and church to be visited and then there are those castle-like private entrances with winding stone staircases that lead to the rooms (in Canada we would call them offices) of the professorate. This is where professors tutor their students and conduct seminars with small groups. The quad or square is open to the sky. The one at Trinity has a beautiful stone gazebo in the middle, paved sidewalks, and enormous lawns surrounded by stern signs asking you not to walk on them. The open areas are usually empty and only penetrated by small groups of visitors who can sign up for guided tours, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  If you are not a student, a professor, or as in my case, a visitor, you cannot wander freely on the grounds. The architectural feel of the place is very 17th century, as if Charles II himself had just returned to the throne and reestablished hierarchy, beauty, and grace to life after the Puritanism of Cromwell. If you go to any one of the chapels, you can hear Evensong sung at 5:30 each afternoon. The porters often wear bowler hats. They have distinctive, almost cinematic working-class or regional accents. They are humble, loyal, and protective of who comes in and who comes out. I explained to the porter that I was the guest of professor so and so and that she had recommended that I tour the Wren library before our meeting. He pointed the way, and I walked out into the quad. Then my phone rang. It was my wife, and she was calling me from Toronto. I sat down on one of the benches outside at the edge of the quad while busy bowler-hatted staff checked the garbage cans in the corner near me and took out the trash. We caught up with each other’s news and while we did so, one gowned, senior professor gave me a quizzical look as if to say, “What are you doing there?” I did not return his glance.  As I finished my call, I noticed that he was being followed by a somewhat nervous, obviously young undergraduate or graduate student who was sort of bouncing up and down in his jerky and ungracious body language, which clearly suggested that this professor held a lot of power over this young man, as his body language was slow, measured, and somewhat regal. The hierarchy between them was obvious to any onlooker. Cambridge and nearby Oxford University have always played a special role in the United Kingdom. It has been the case for centuries that Britain’s most privileged and brightest mix and mingle here in their undergraduate years. Then so many of them go into government, diplomacy, banking, publishing, and media.  This has been going on for hundreds of years and so a graduate speaks with a certain accent, carries herself with a certain quiet confidence, and is supported by a network of older graduates who will bring you into government service or that now shamed organization, the BBC.  It is an old boys and girls club, and it is even more powerful for the professors, who are truly above average in their intelligence and drive, and the students, even and perhaps especially the ones who get in on scholarship. I slowly strolled across the quad, through another set of ancient stone archways, reached another courtyard/quad, and found the staircase that leads to the Wren Library.  It is a grand affair with high ceilings and beautiful windows from which you can see the River Cam and the young men and women who punt flat, longish boats there for visitors and their own enjoyment. There are marble statues of famous men like Tennyson lining the staircase. As you turn the corners of the stairs on the high walls beside you, you see paintings of “Masters” of the college from recent times, and from centuries back.  When you reach the top of the marvelous staircase, you enter the library through two large wooden doors. You are immediately confronted with the simple, elegant Restoration architecture of this marvelous building. There is so much space, the windows are high, and the place is bathed in light. No doubt in pre-industrial and pre-electrical times, a student or a scholar could start their day here, read and write until lunchtime, and then return until the sun went down. It is an uplifting feeling. The floors have diamond-shaped black and white tiles that oddly suggested to me something out of a grand filmed version of Alice in Wonderland. Half of the library was roped off, the half down the hall from the entrance. A group of students were having a seminar there. And yes, as British academics are often quiet in their demeanor, you could see the students, but you could not hear them. The part of the library open to the public is comprised of alcoves with enormously high hand-crafted wooden bookshelves. When I glanced at the contents of the books, the bindings suggested 19th-century and earlier tomes. The tops of the bookshelves are decorated with marble busts of Homer and Democritus and no doubt there were others that I did not recognize. In front of these alcoves, in the main walkway, are glass-covered tables with exhibits in them. They are covered with cloth, like in a raised tomb in an old chapel, and you line up to take off the cloth while you look at the exhibits until you cover them up once again until the next visitor comes. I lingered at the box which contained a copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia with his own handwritten annotations on the side. Beside that book lies his crooked walking stick. One can imagine this illustrious graduate of Trinity going for walks along the nearby River Cam, only to return to his desk in one of the alcoves where he once pondered and explained the mysteries of celestial mechanics. Of course I stared with humility at a First Folio volume of the complete works of Shakespeare. And then just beside Newton’s book are pages from the working notebooks of the Indian Hindu mathematician Ramanujan who during World War I came to Cambridge to submit his unique and stunning mathematical genius to the scrutiny of the mathematical dons of Cambridge. I have read his biography by Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity, and have seen the dramatic film about his life with the same name.  The curators had clearly decided not to highlight Newton’s obsession with the Temple in Jerusalem. Newton spent thousands of hours reading and writing about it. He even predicted that it would be rebuilt some time in the 21st century. Not surprisingly, these writings can be examined in the National Archives of Israel in Jerusalem. I paid little attention to another well-curated table, about a Cambridge student from the 1930s, a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party who went to Spain to fight with the Republicans in 1936. It once again reminded me of how Stalin and the Communists took over the fight against Fascist Franco and lost the war for the Republicans. George Orwell wrote a book about it, Farewell to Catalonia. I had plenty of time before my appointment, and I lingered at the entrance to the library. I noticed that the first two alcoves on either side had been taken over by administrators or librarians. They had put tables and office chairs in the alcoves in front of the ancient shelves of books.  These alcoves were now strewn with computers, cables, files, books, papers, empty tea and coffee cups, as well as coats and jackets that were draped over the chairs and umbrellas lying on their side. They had placed bright red fire extinguishers on the floor in front of the alcoves. It was quite a visual contrast to the spirit of the place. Having once served as a museum curator for several years early in my career, I was stunned by this asymmetrical modern visual administrative assault on the harmony and order of Wren’s library. I had an involuntary visceral reaction to this modern intrusion into this 17th-century marvel. It was like putting an Andy Warhol poster beside a painting by Tintoretto. I was surprised at myself, but I could not let go of this feeling of intrusive, almost aggressive modernity. I immediately had a vivid fantasy that I was now the curator of the Wren Library. I had organized a weekly review of our activities with my staff. I tried to raise the issue that this visual assault took away from the character and dignity of our “chief exhibit,” the library itself. I suggested to my coworkers that we find offices either in a different part of the building, or somewhere in the college where administrators work. My tattooed and purple-haired employees (“coworkers”) objected vigorously. They told me that as employees of the library they felt it was “their” library too. They implied that my suggestion was a reflection of the patriarchal ideology of men like Newton and Wren who had built the place. They reminded me that this was England 2025, not 1625. One of them piped up that according to his biographers, Newton was asexual, which he said could not be true. He therefore suggested an exhibit with the title “Newton Comes out of the Closet.”  And then I woke up from this daydream of a nightmare. I instantly felt that same sense of relief that I had when, as a teenager, having finished my annual exams, the summer was now mine. It was not my problem. I was just visiting. As I was not part of the visiting tour, I exited the library quietly but did not leave the building. I wanted to see if the library was at a different level still functional. I noticed a small sign with an arrow that said, “Library,” and I followed it.  I walked into a long room with an exceptionally low ceiling. Yes, there are small windows that look out on to the quad, but the feeling is like functional workers’ flats compared to a palace. There were tables everywhere with earnest young men and women reading books and typing quietly on their computers. They did not pay much attention to me, and so I browsed the shelves. I notice a book called After Piketty, referencing the now famous partly Marxist-inspired French economist, Thomas Piketty, who has argued, some say persuasively, that capitalism cannot really endure, for it has not successfully created enough for the many.  Most French economists like Piketty are like the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, academic graduates of elite schools who do not venture out into the private sector (although those in science and tech often do). And then I held back a laugh when I saw a large tome called, The Oxford Guide to the American West. I wondered whether it was really possible for Oxbridge graduates to sympathetically understand the beauty, vastness, freedom, and living symbolism of the American West, a mythology that still drives the multibillion dollar County and Western style of American music and which has found a place in the hearts of millions of British and European listeners, mostly working and middle class. I will let the reader decide. And then I noticed something: a bare, almost empty wooden shelf that faced up to a sign that said, “Philosophy.” Beside it in this empty space stood a large glass jar, filled with water and a variety of plants that thrive in that semiaquatic artifact, reminding me of Darwin’s definition of nature as a “tangled web,” an apt symbol for the study of philosophy, which attempts to get beneath appearances like Newton and Darwin (another Cambridge man) did, thus revealing the hidden structure of the world we all live in.  As I left this demotic, cramped, and uninviting part of the Wren library, I noticed that the curators or the librarians had decided to take up precious wall space with one photo portrait, a black and white picture of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been a student at Cambridge during the 1930s. When Nehru became the prime minister of a newly independent India, he inherited a situation where the post–World War II Euro–American powers were well disposed toward this new democracy.  British, European, and American investors would have flocked to India had they been allowed. Instead, Nehru and his Congress Party adopted the principles of Marxist-inspired British Fabian socialism, crippled the Indian economy, and impoverished the country for decades through incompetent government takeovers of the “commanding heights of the economy.” Only in the 1990s when Indian voters finally elected a government that had nothing to do with Nehru and his political heirs did the Indian economy open up and, within a short time, create an Indian middle class of a few hundred million people.  We must not forget that famine-prone India was not saved by socialists like Nehru, but by capitalist-based, Yankee ingenuity and agricultural science, which gave India the Green Revolution, and which has for the moment solved India’s ability to feed its own people. Today one must ask the question: Who is symbolically in the ascendant at Oxford, Cambridge, and at Britain’s other institutes of higher learning: the followers of Newton, Wren, and Darwin or the followers of Marx, Nehru, and Piketty? Just ask world-famous Canadian philosopher and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was banned from Cambridge despite a formal invitation from the Faculty of Divinity to spend time there as a resident professor. This is what Douglas Murray wrote about it: Before the university even had the decency to alert Peterson to the fact, it was announced that the offer of a visiting fellowship had been rescinded. And the University itself was not even the one to break the news that the offer had been rescinded. That pleasure – for pleasure it must have been for them – went to the Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) which announced the news on social media before the faculty itself made the announcement. For those who visit the Wren Library, do not be fooled by the august exhibits and bookshelves of some of Britain’s greatest thinkers. Those kinds of people, and those that still honor them, are no longer in charge.  The ones in charge are the militant and indoctrinated students studying in the library below the library, who read their Marx and Piketty and who ban the likes of Jordan Peterson from teaching at their colleges. No, these young men and women prefer the modern writings of the Left that have created a radicalized student body that no longer wants to imitate the great men and women at Cambridge who came before them. They are the ones with authority. If you consult your astrologer, you will see that the stars are not aligned in our favor. Let us hope they will realign. Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.