This chapter focuses on intersection of imperial nostalgism and the ‘free speech crisis’ in higher education in the UK over the past few years. Using as a case study Professor Nigel Biggar’s career as a notional free speech martyr, it situates the current right-wing discourse about university, empire and free speech within the longer history of the close relationship between the university (in this case Oxford) and the imperial power/knowledge complex, and argues that elite universities in particular are a significant part of our imaginaries of race, gender, nation and empire. Widening its scope to take in incidents such as the media campaign against Lola Olufemi for requesting curricular changes at Cambridge, academic ‘cancellations’ including those of Noah Carl and Jordan Peterson, and the formation of the ‘Free Speech Union’, this chapter argues that the defence of the university, for figures such as Biggar, is ultimately a defence of certain imaginaries of whiteness.