… at one of the highest seats of learning on Earth [Christ Church, Oxford], the democratic principle of free and open debate, of allowing differing opinions to slog it out in full view of discerning citizens, has been violated, and students have been rebranded as fragile creatures, overgrown children who need to be guarded against any idea that might prick their souls or challenge their prejudices.
In the Spectator,
Brendan O'Neill tells us he is aghast. He asks:
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
… In each case, it wasn’t the fact the students disagreed with me that I
found alarming — disagreement is great! — it was that they were so
plainly shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed
to conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to
contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive
ideas.
… Barely a week goes by without reports of something ‘offensive’ being
banned by students. Robin Thicke’s rude pop ditty ‘Blurred Lines’ has
been banned in more than 20 universities. Student officials at Balliol
College, Oxford, justified their ban as a means of ‘prioritising the
wellbeing of our students’. Apparently a three-minute pop song can harm
students’ health. More than 30 student unions have banned the Sun,
on the basis that Page Three could turn all those pre-rapists into
actual rapists. Radical feminist students once burned their bras — now
they insist that models put bras on. The union at UCL banned the
Nietzsche Society on the grounds that its existence threatened ‘the
safety of the UCL student body’.
Stepford concerns are over-amplified on social media. No sooner is a
contentious subject raised than a university ‘campaign’ group appears on
Facebook, or a hashtag on Twitter, demanding that the debate is shut
down. Technology means that it has never been easier to whip up a false
sense of mass outrage — and target that synthetic anger at those in
charge. The authorities on the receiving end feel so besieged that they
succumb to the demands and threats.
Heaven help any student who doesn’t bow before the Stepford mentality. … They’re
being made to take part in equality and diversity training. At British
unis in 2014, you don’t just get education — you also get re-education,
Soviet style.
… The censoriousness has reached its nadir in the rise of the ‘safe
space’ policy. Loads of student unions have colonised vast swaths of
their campuses and declared them ‘safe spaces’ — that is, places where
no student should ever be made to feel threatened, unwelcome or
belittled, whether by banter, bad thinking or ‘Blurred Lines’. Safety
from physical assault is one thing — but safety from words, ideas,
Zionists, lads, pop music, Nietzsche? We seem to have nurtured a new
generation that believes its self-esteem is more important than everyone
else’s liberty.
This is what those censorious Cambridgers meant when they kept saying
they have the ‘right to be comfortable’. They weren’t talking about the
freedom to lay down on a chaise longue — they meant the right never to
be challenged by disturbing ideas or mind-battered by offensiveness. At
precisely the time they should be leaping brain-first into the rough and
tumble of grown-up, testy discussion, students are cushioning
themselves from anything that has the whiff of controversy. We’re
witnessing the victory of political correctness by stealth. As the
annoying ‘PC gone mad!’ brigade banged on and on about extreme instances
of PC — schools banning ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, etc. — nobody seems to
have noticed that the key tenets of PC, from the desire to destroy
offensive lingo to the urge to re-educate apparently corrupted minds,
have been swallowed whole by a new generation. This is a disaster, for
it means our universities are becoming breeding grounds of dogmatism. As
John Stuart Mill said, if we don’t allow our opinion to be ‘fully,
frequently, and fearlessly discussed’, then that opinion will be ‘held
as a dead dogma, not a living truth’.
One day, these Stepford students, with their lust to ban, their war
on offensive lingo, and their terrifying talk of pre-crime, will be
running the country. And then it won’t only be those of us who
occasionally have cause to visit a campus who have to suffer their dead
dogmas.
