Esther Harper 💜🤍💚 🇬🇧 🇮🇱

When I was a student at St Andrews University, the late great Nicholas Parsons was Rector. He was approachable, diligent, and did a proper job; students could contact him, he turned up, and he took the role seriously without turning it into a platform for ideology. Now Q Manivannan is standing for the same position. Before becoming a Green MSP, Manivannan went on a podcast and claimed there is “definitely a demonisation of rape” and that rape is “a spectrum,” with “different modes” of consent and contexts. An apology followed, with claims of selective editing and insistence that all rape is equally serious. Rape crisis centres still called it out for minimising sexual violence. A Rector is meant to be someone female students can trust when they need the student voice amplified on safety and assault. Electing a candidate whose public comments treated rape as a theoretical spectrum sends the opposite message to survivors: your experience can be relativised. Gender-critical students face an extra problem. Manivannan is non-binary and insists on “they/them” pronouns. Putting someone in a position of institutional power who insists on those pronouns forces students who reject gender ideology to either comply or risk being labelled bigoted or simply not to contact their Rector at all. That’s not representation, it’s compelled speech from the person meant to open doors for them. As an MSP representing Edinburgh and Lothians East, Q would also have less time available to his constituents. For someone who is such a proponent of DEI, Q also seems very keen to greedily collect extra senior institutional roles for himself rather than sharing them out with others. Nicholas Parsons showed what the Rector role should look like: friendly, diligent and focused on students. Manivannan’s record raises serious doubts about whether that standard can be met at St Andrews. Students and constituents should take note.