Some years ago, a student asked me if I thought AC was a 'moral place'. My answer, then, was that in my view it was; not in the sense that all that happens is morally right, of course, but in the sense that one gets away with, is in fact expected to give, moral arguments for one's opinions and behaviour, and has to accept criticism on moral grounds. That is not so in most places, and was to my mind one of the things that made us special.

These days I would be less sure of that answer. It has been some time since I have heard, arising from within the College community, any discussion of such questions as whether it is morally right to impose Western values on societies that still practise FGM or have arranged marriages, against their cultural heritage; or to ban smoking, drinking or the use of drugs, against the free choice by indiviudals; or to spend £ 40,000 on two years of one student's education at AC, when the same sum would be sufficient to fund a whole school for a year in many countries.

While we may have moved forward in other areas, it seems to me that we may well have lost a kind of discourse that it will be hard to restart ...