My friend Richard updated his will a couple of weeks ago. He asked for his bequest to an Oxford college to be removed. The solicitor was not surprised. “I’ve had a lot of clients doing the same thing lately,” he said. “Those universities are starting to lose serious money.”

When I asked Richard why he had cancelled the donation to his alma mater, he sighed: “General wokery. The environment is so different to the culture that we benefitted from when we were there – the link with the past, the hope for the future. Why would I want to support an organisation that has changed so markedly to something I do not recognise or understand? It’s gone, very quickly, from a place that I loved, and which loved me, to one where I now feel deeply uncomfortable and distinctly unwelcome.”

Whatever contortions they are obliged to perform by their professional bodies, workplaces and vigilantes on social media, I sense that a sizeable proportion of my generation has had enough. We are quietly voting with our chequebooks and our direct debits which, increasingly, we withhold from the National Trust and other formerly venerable bodies now idiotically abasing themselves before the monstrous ideological police. “Sir, I am running out of memberships to cancel,’’ complained Charlotte Mackay, wonderfully, in this paper’s Letters to the Editor. Trust me, Charlotte, you are not alone.

Where once we would have taken pleasure in giving something back to the institution that shaped us, now we look on appalled as that same institution capitulates to rabble-rousing brats almost entirely ignorant of the achievements of the historical figures whose statues they demand be torn down. (Or removes their great works from the curriculum, to be replaced by poets who cannot rhyme.) Not to mention the growing reluctance of certain universities to admit the highly qualified offspring of their own graduates. As one female barrister put it: “I got into Cambridge from a council house and a crap comp. I gave my kids a much better education than I had, and now my university doesn’t want them on account of their ‘white privilege’. Give me strength!”

Dozens of donors have cancelled financial gifts to the University of Edinburgh since it renamed the David Hume Tower over the philosopher’s comments on race more than 250 years ago. The presiding genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume held views which now look either radical and laudably ahead of their time or discordantly ugly. An opponent of slavery, he helped his patron Lord Hertford buy a slave plantation. Guess what, human beings were as complicated and flawed back then as they are now. Edinburgh said it had to act to protect student “sensitivities”. Many alumni disagree. “Hume was cancelled in life by the Scottish universities for failing to fall in line with the religious tenets of his day,” wrote one, “so I admire him in death for having the same effect on the grandees of this new [woke] religion.”

I suspect that graduates of Imperial College London will have a similar reaction on hearing that a building named after Thomas Henry Huxley, the great biologist and anthropologist who determined that birds descended from dinosaurs, is set to be renamed. A report by the university’s chillingly named “independent history group” has recommended that the name Huxley be excised because of his beliefs about human intelligence. The group cites Huxley’s essay of 1865, “Emancipation — Black and White”, which it says “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’, legacies of which are still felt today”.

You have to hand it to old Huxley. He cunningly hid his racism by being a leading voice in the movement for the abolition of slavery. Yes, some of his observations make us recoil today. But, yesterday, I looked up that self-same “offensive” essay, and here is a very different sort of paragraph: “We find girls naturally timid, prone to dependence, born conservatives; and we teach them that independence is unladylike; that blind faith is the right frame of mind; and that whatever we may be permitted, and indeed encouraged, to do to our brother, our sister is to be left to the tyranny of authority and tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man, or a sort of angels above him… The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than the male; that women are meant neither to be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows and their equals, so far as nature puts no bar to that equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls.”

Over 150 years later, I feel almost tearful with gratitude coming across an establishment figure like Thomas Henry Huxley making the case, with such fierce logic and unrepentant eloquence, for my sex to receive the same education as the male. Do you think the Imperial College London’s independent history group weigh Huxley’s remarkable early feminism in its judgment to strip his name from a beloved building?

Of course not. The Inquisition seeks villains to burn retrospectively at the stake not human beings with the full complement of vices and virtues. They should christen Imperial’s Huxley building the Pol Pot Year Zero building, in memory of the cultural vandals who took him down, and be done with it. Come to that, how long will the college be allowed to call itself Imperial? Bit insensitive, isn’t it?

Stephen Warren, professor of astronomy at Imperial, called the report “astonishing”, and said: “I am sorry that it has chosen to judge people from the past by the standards of today. I would say that Thomas Henry Huxley is the individual of whom Imperial can be most proud.”

You can bet that alumni who share that opinion will be busy writing Imperial out of their wills. Such direct action can be surprisingly effective in the fightback against the woke activists. When Oriel College, Oxford, was deciding whether to appease the mob and give in to demands to take down the bust of its benefactor Cecil Rhodes, almost overnight charitable donations collapsed. Former students, who thought that a college dating back to 1326 should have the guts to stand up for its history, disinherited Oriel. Rhodes wobbled, but he did not fall. Instead, the college established new scholarships for African students using his fortune to enhance the future, not obliterate the past.

The self-righteous young mob thinks it can get universities to grovel with the threat of being cancelled. My generation is learning to beat them at that game: we just cancel the direct debit.