James Delingpole

limits. My old university, Oxford, is doing brilliantly. One year, it listened sympathetically to students wanting to pull down a statue of Cecil Rhodes – the very benefactor who’d founded the scholarships that paid for some of them to study.

Another college cancelled a debate on abortion because the speakers were men, and apparently only women are now entitled to discuss so fraught an issue.

But this year, it outdid itself when its Equality and Diversity Unit warned staff that failing to make contact with certain students might be deemed “racist”, and that asking students about their origins could damage their mental health.

When you read about nonsense like this in the newspapers, your inclination is probably to go: “Ah well, it’s only students playing silly beggars.”

Which would be fair enough if students didn’t now constitute 50 per cent of our universityage population. And if, in a year or two, these grisly little prigs weren’t all going to waltz into plum graduate posts across the land: into politics, the civil service, law firms, big corporations, the police, the Armed Forces, academia.

So the values that apply today on campus will be invading your workplace tomorrow – and our legal and political systems the day after.

In fact it’s already happening. This week, the Labour Party chose to ape this crybully student behaviour by banning TalkRadio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer from its next conference. Why? Because she’d posted on the internet a video of herself saying “Boo!” in a toilet that Labour had designated a “safe space”.

The virus is spreading fast. If you’ve noticed how much riskier it is to speak your mind or make jokes at work; if you’re seething about someone who has been promoted above you for reasons of “gender equality” or “diversity” rather than raw talent; if you’re bothered by those new transgender-friendly toilets they’ve just installed – well it all probably came from universities where they imbibe this PC stuff 24/7.

I’ve experienced it on speaker visits to universities myself and it’s depressing. The majority of students just want to get on and study and have fun but they’re tyrannised by an oppressive minority of social justice warrior activists. Everyone’s treading on eggshells; nobody is sure what it’s safe to say but each year the rules seem to get more strict, so people prefer not to take the risk.

HOW can this be higher education? It’s brainwashing. Instead of opening students’ minds to new ideas, the policy of “safe spaces” combined with “noplatforming” for any speaker who doesn’t accord with the Leftist narrative leaves our kids more ignorant than when they arrive at college.

And probably less employable too. What use is a snowflake law graduate so sensitive she gets triggered by gory details in court cases? How are archeology graduates supposed to manage if they’re scared of bones? How do graduates of the once-respected journalism course at City University, London, expect to be taken seriously when they’ve been to a college where the Sun, the Mail and the Express are banned?

So good luck to all you undergraduates beginning your three or four years at university. But I have to say: rather you than me.

‘Nowhere is free from this kind of PC terror’