Conference Program

From “woke campuses” to an alleged free-speech crisis, UK universities are increasingly framed as politically charged spaces (Fryer, 2023; Loader, 2015; Raaper, 2024). Yet empirical research remains limited on whether higher education actually politicises today’s students, even as media attention to this issue has intensified (Scott, 2022; Simon, 2022). In this talk, we will explore the following questions: how does the UK press portray student politics, what evidence do these articles rely on, and whose voices are heard and whose might be missing? We will draw on a systematic media analysis of UK national newspapers (September 2020–September 2025), in which we used Lexis+ UK and a targeted keyword strategy to build a final dataset of 89 articles.

Two findings will be discussed in detail: First, widespread claims that universities strongly shape students’ political views, particularly by promoting left-wing or “woke” ideologies, are rarely supported by robust empirical evidence. Second, more than half of all coverage focuses on Oxford and Cambridge, with incidents at these elite institutions frequently treated as representative of the higher education sector as a whole. We will discuss why this matters and what is obscured when “the student” is imagined through Oxbridge alone.

The proposed talk points to a highly relevant and pressing societal issue of today’s educational and political landscape in many European countries and beyond. It aims to contribute to the panel discussion by reflecting on how education is mobilised within broader anti-democratic and reactionary discourses (Bennett et al., 2017).