Sometime in the evening of Monday January 15th this year, the parents of Oxford Student Alexander Rogers received the phone call that no parent ever truly recovers from. Their son, a 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate blessed with good looks, brains, and the promise of a life that would make them proud, was dead by his own hand. An eyewitness had spotted him jumping from the Donnington Bridge, just a few miles south of the centre of old Oxford.
Alexander, a UK inquest heard last week, had taken his own life after a campaign of social ostracization and “cancelling” amongst his peer group. This had followed a sexual encounter he is alleged to have had with a fellow student on January 11th, four days before his death.
We do not know the nature of that sexual encounter. We only know the following: Sometime after it had concluded, his partner expressed discontent about something that had gone on between them. She did not express this discontent in the form of a criminal complaint, and Alexander was not being investigated for any crime. Nor was the incident reported to college authorities.
Instead, she expressed her discontent within their mutual group of friends.
After Alexander’s death, an emergency review by Corpus Christi college, where he was a student, found that he had been subjected to a campaign of total social exclusion. Friends – including his very best friends – would no longer speak to him. Two of those friends – “C” and “E” in the Corpus Christi report told Alexander that he had “messed up” and that they “needed space from him”.
In response, Alexander crafted two suicide notes. One for his friends expressing remorse, and one for his family expressing his love. He then took his final walk.
In her review into his death, specialist mental health GP Dr Dominique Thompson found that there was a “pervasive culture of shunning” amongst Alexander’s peer group, and that this is “a cultural phenomenon amongst young people.
This story, I have to say, enrages me like few others I’ve encountered this year.
First, there is the context: There are few greater nightmares for any young man than to be thought of as a sexual predator or a sexual criminal. In this case, a 20-year-old man was essentially convicted and sentenced of that crime amongst his peer group based on an unproven and uninvestigated allegation not even deemed worthy of criminal complaint. Alexander Rogers had reason to believe his life – at least the social part of it – was functionally at an end.
College cliques and groups persist. He had reason to believe that the whispers against him would follow him around university for the remainder of his days there, and that they would permeate beyond his peer group into his work life and beyond. That he would always be the dodgy guy who women quietly warned other women about.
But of course, if you believe that someone’s conduct is worthy of removal from polite society, then polite society already has a mechanism to bring this about – the criminal justice system. In this case, the criminal justice system was not employed. This was old-fashioned mob justice.
And what justice. Oxford Colleges are famously small, and intimate places. Students sleep, eat, and study together. Alexander would have had no place to turn, and no place to escape to. Just the promise of permanent, continuous, social isolation and judgment. In the words of a friend, he would have become a living ghost, able to see but functionally invisible to those around him. The cruelty is spectacular in its vileness.
Second, there is the culture: You could call what happened to Alexander Rogers part of the culture of “wokeness”. “Woke” of course comes from the word “awake”, as in “being awake and alert to injustice”. This is presented to us as a culture of compassion, when in fact it is a culture of the utmost cruelty which actively encourages stupid young people to render final moral judgments on others based on a form of half-baked group consensus. In this case we see the very same dynamic at play that we see with nonsense like pronoun badges or taking a knee before a soccer game – you’re not doing these things out of genuine moral conviction but because you fear the consequences of not doing them. Of not being seen to be the right sort of person. How many of Alexander Rogers’ peers shunned him out of genuine disgust, and how many shunned him because of an unspoken social obligation to do so lest they in turn be accused of sympathising with his offence?
Third, there is the tragedy of modern life: Alexander Rogers came to find himself in a sexual liaison with a young woman. We do not know exactly what transpired between them, but we can safely say that both parties to that liaison were deeply hurt by it.
At the age of 19 or 20, you are inclined to think you know everything and are entirely prepared for the consequences of your very grown up, very adult, very mature decisions and lifestyle choices. That simply isn’t true, and there is no sex education module on earth right now that admits this fact. Consent is not everything. It’s not even the most important thing. Trust, communication, and mutual compassion are vastly more important, since consent will naturally flow – or not flow – from those. Simply securing a noise of potential assent to a particular arrangement of body parts and hoping that everyone will feel fine afterwards is to be entirely ignorant of the emotional and other consequences that may flow from your actions.
In this instance, something non-criminal occurred that ended up deeply hurting two young people. Progressivism and modern liberalism has nothing useful to say about this other than “next time secure enthusiastic consent”.
Fourth, there is the university authorities. Oxford University bears no direct responsibility for this death, but I’d argue that it bears much of the blame for facilitating the culture of self-righteousness and judgmentalism amongst its student body that led to this death. That culture is primed to view people like Alexander Rogers as villains – young, well-off, privileged white men. His alleged crimes did not need to stand up or be stood up in a courtroom or a disciplinary proceedings because almost everything in modern academia points students towards the idea that the privileged are almost always the villains, and that in the hierarchy of privilege people like Alexander Rogers are at the very top, and therefore the most likely villains. He never stood a chance of a fair hearing from a peer group taught to think that way. What’s more, the privilege of his peer group likely worked against him. When privileged young men are the villains, other privileged young men feel socially obligated to say “we’re not like him“. The dynamic is not unlike that of China in the communist cultural revolution, when neighbours were encouraged to denounce each other to prove their own ideological fealty.
This culture is the direct responsibility of educators.
I am, as circumstances would have it, not a father. Were I a father, I would fear for my children in this culture. Nobody gets to 40 years of age, as I am, without having had their share of life experiences and made their share of mistakes. You hope that when those mistakes occur, whether they be in the professional or personal fields, there will be those around you who will show you compassion and forgiveness and understanding.
That basic decency was not there for Alexander Rogers. He’s dead now. The coroner, for the record, says that he can’t say with certainty that the shunning and ostracization he experienced was the primary cause of his death.
Well, I can say it. I hope at least that his former friends have learned a hard lesson here. His parents and family certainly have.