By Brendan O'neill: When you hear the word ‘university’, what image comes to mind? Dreaming spires? A sun- dappled quad? The brightest of Britain’s youth strolling about, minds wide open to new ideas, controversial theories, different ways of thinking?
Think again. Britain’s universities have changed. They’ve turned from citadels of intellectual inquiry into sprawling camps of conformism, where anyone who dissents from what is decreed to be the correct thought processes will be cast out into the academic darkness.
Our colleges are now stuffed not with bright-eyed students keen to discuss any ideas, however radical, but proselytising zealots who will hound off campus anyone that offends their politically correct sensibilities. They spend their time constantly on the lookout for thinkers or books or even pop songs that blaspheme against their right-on ideology.
They are what you might call the student Stasi, and I have discovered for myself what it is like to be on the receiving end of their self-righteous ire.
A year ago, in November 2014, I was due to speak at Oxford University in a debate about abortion. But a gang of fuming student feminists had other ideas.
They said it would be offensive to female students to have ‘a person without a uterus’ — what most of us call ‘a man’ — talking about abortion. Such a discussion would harm their ‘mental safety’, they claimed. So they set up a Facebook page littered with expletives which demanded that the debate should be called off.
It was like an online mob jumping up and down with pitchforks.
The Facebook furies threatened to turn up to the discussion with ‘instruments’ — and they didn’t mean musical instruments — to ‘disrupt’ it. The irony of them threatening the physical safety of a university meeting in the name of defending their own ‘mental safety’ was lost on these alleged bright young things.
Even more depressing than this ludicrous protest was the fact that Oxford’s university management kowtowed to the hysteria and cancelled the debate.
This week, Britain’s other great seat of learning, Cambridge, showed that it is likewise happy to spurn those who hold what are considered to be the ‘wrong views’.
Following complaints about the inclusion of the scabrous but brilliant historian David Starkey in a video promoting Cambridge, Starkey was banned from taking part. The short film features famous Cambridge alumni talking about how life at the university changed them, as part of a £2 billion funding drive.
But the potential appearance of Starkey — known for his robustly un-PC views — caused a hissy fit among both student union officials and lecturers. They were signatories to an open letter which called the historian ‘a man who has a well-documented and undeniable history of racism and sexism’.
Now this isn’t Bernard Manning we’re talking about — it is one of Britain’s best-loved historians, who has enlightened millions about the Elizabethan era. He also regularly injects spark and sass into grey TV shows like Question Time.
No DOUBT one of the comments the university has taken offence at — like an ageing Duchess clutching her smelling salts — was his observation after the London riots of 2011 that ‘the whites have become black’.
To explain his point, he went on to talk about the pernicious influence of what he called the ‘destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’ which he said ‘has become the fashion’ in our inner cities.
He has also expressed withering views in the past on ‘pretty girl historians’ — and this is his reward, ostracised by his own university.
Thankfully, some of Starkey’s fellow historians are agitating for his place in the video to be reinstated, and are fuming against Cambridge’s capitulation to the self-appointed censors. But I don’t suppose they will do much good. These illiberal students will brook no opposition.
In the year between my being banned from the Oxford abortion debate and the shameful traducing of David Starkey at Cambridge, barely a week has passed without students screaming for the censorship of things that ‘hurt’ them. They even call for ‘safe spaces’ where they can go without feeling threatened either intellectually or physically.
Students at Cardiff University demanded that the leading feminist Germaine Greer should be ‘No Platformed’ — in other words banned from being able to speak in public — because they objected to comments she had made about transgender issues.
They insisted that Greer’s belief that men who have sex-change surgery do not become real women, has ‘no place in society’. What tyrannical arrogance to think they should be the arbiters of which voices should and should not be heard.
In the end, Greer’s lecture went ahead this week, but not without a gang of placard-waving students outside insisting that her words are ‘harmful’.
In September, the student union at Warwick University banned the Iranian-born secularist and critic of Islamism, Maryam Namazie. They said that her views would upset Muslim students.
This is a woman whose family escaped Iran in the hope that in the West they’d be free to say whatever they please. Yet Warwick students behaved like little ayatollahs themselves — affronted by the sight of a woman who has the gall to criticise Islam — and sought to shut her up.
Following a public outcry, she was re-invited — but when students resemble the finger-wagging rulers of Iran, you know there’s something rotten on campus.
Last month, the colourful feminist Julie Bindel was ‘No Platformed’ by the student union at Manchester University. Why? Because ten years ago, in the Guardian, she penned an article criticising transgenderism — blasphemy in the eyes of the self-elected guardians of accepted thought.
(She wrote: ‘I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women.’)
It isn’t only different or daring thinkers who are silenced by censorious students. At the end of last year, Dapper Laughs, a perma-tanned Cockney comic, was banned from performing at Cardiff University. Student officials claimed that his jokes ‘dehumanise’ women and are therefore ‘inappropriate’. Among the thought police, the word ‘inappropriate’ signals that something is wicked, and must be stopped. Sometimes, this student intolerance crosses the line from sinister to surreal.
More than 30 student unions in Britain have banned the American singer Robin Thicke’s salacious smash hit song about seduction, Blurred Lines, claiming that it makes female students feel unsafe.
Last year, a DJ at a student bar in Oxford accidentally played Blurred Lines, causing a student official to leap up and unplug the sound system, like a nun at a school disco tut-tutting over the Rolling Stones.
Other student unions have banned lads’ mags, tabloid newspapers, even sombreros: they claim it is ‘cultural appropriation’ — whatever that means — for middle-class white kids to don Mexican hats.
Some student unions enforce these ‘No Platform’ policies not only against neo-fascist parties, but also against UKIP — which was banned at the University of East Anglia. Equally, it can be difficult for Israel-supporting students to hold discussions on some campuses because the prevailing attitude among many students and academics is pro-Palestinian.
Recently, the student union at University College, London, banned a Nietzsche reading group, fearing that it would inculcate students with Right-wing ideas.
Friedrich Nietzsche is, of course, a giant among 19th-century philosophers, and widely studied. Yet exposure to his views was deemed to be too dangerous. Nothing is safe: not famous feminists, popular historians or cheeky stand-up comedians. Everything they find distasteful must be expunged.
Such intolerance reached its nadir when students at Goldsmith’s College in London and also at Cambridge recently burned the newspapers of Far-left groups that they find offensive. Now, burning literature has dark, disgusting historical echoes.
The word ‘fascist’ must never be used lightly. But to destroy with fire words you don’t like? That is fascistic, and the very opposite of the freedom of thought that should prevail on 21st-century campuses.
As we have seen, the New Fascists, and the academic apologists who cave in to their censorious demands, frown on alternative thinking and seek to eradicate dissenting thought.
The end result is a narrow dogma in which only one world view can prevail. But a university banning freedom of thought is like a hospital giving up on medical treatment — an abandonment of its very reason to exist.
David Starkey must be reinstated in that Cambridge video. But we must go so much further: the freedom to think and debate — and, yes, to rile and offend — must be reinstated on every campus in the land.
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