Victimhood must be banished to let free speech thrive
OUR universities are meant to be arenas of free expression and open debate. But due to the grip of fashionable progressive ideology, they are becoming bastions of intolerant groupthink.
A climate of censorship and authoritarianism prevails on too many campuses, fuelled by politically-motivated students desperate to wallow in concocted victimhood.
Instead of standing up for essential liberties, the enfeebled university authorities often collude with this bullying culture of invented grievance.
A disturbing example comes from Cambridge University where the students’ union has voted to ban military personnel from its annual freshers’ fair.
According to the handwringing motion passed by the union, the presence of military with firearms “is alarming” and “has the potential to detrimentally affect students’ mental welfare.” Moreover, it said that allowing such personnel to take part in the fair would show “implicit approval”.The union’s aim, said its welfare officer Stella Swain, is to “demilitarise” the university, so the fair should not be a place for “military organisations to recruit.”
HOW pathetic is this policy and so offensive. It is presented as an act of humanitarian concern, but in reality it is a form of selfrighteous oppression.The union seems determined to reinforce the perception that today’s students are just a bunch of snowflakes, too lacking in resilience to cope even with the sight of a gun. Many Cambridge undergraduates would relish the chance to experience the discipline and excitement of military life. Yet their opportunities to do so are being thwarted by those dogmatists who arrogantly think they have the right to demand complete subservience to their outlook.
On a deeper level, the union’s anti-military posturing is absurd for, without the heroism of the Armed Forces, Britain would be in real danger from brutality. Our military is not an instrument of persecution but the very bulwark of British freedom.
This week is not the first time that the students’ union has stood accused of denigrating the British armed forces.
In October 2018 it threw out a motion urging greater recognition at the university for Remembrance Day, preferring to demand a campaign “against militarism” and the “glorification of war.”
But then, Stella Swain almost sounds like a parody of a politically correct zealot, complete with the usual moral superiority and intolerance. Despite the privilege of attending one of the greatest universities in the world, she moaned in 2018 about Cambridge University’s “fundamental injustices” which mean the place “is steeped in historic and continuing oppression.” Nor, it would seem, has she much time for free speech.
In 2017 she wrote that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “abhorrent views have no place in our modern and equal society.”
The latest Cambridge saga encapsulates several worrying trends in university life. One is the obsession with gesture politics, designed to signal the virtue of the attention-seeking campaigners. So, in the name of anti-discrimination, student unions call for meat-free menus, transgender-friendly toilets, and the flying of lesbian and gay flags. At Norwich’s University of East Anglia, a Mexican restaurant was even banned from handing out sombreros to students as part of a marketing exercise, on the grounds that this promoted “cultural stereotypes”.
Another is the belief that delicate students have to be protected from anything that might give offence or distress. It is a destructive theory that has led to the creation of so-called “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings” and even the employment of marshals at events to make sure speakers do not tread on any fragile sensibilities.
AT its darkest this trait has also fed a sinister new type of campus McCarthyism where any opinions that dissent from the ruling orthodoxy are ruthlessly silenced. What we now witness across our universities is the fervour of the ancient witchhunt, dressed up in the language of identity politics. Like modern heretics, feminists as distinguished as Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer have been regularly banned because they dare to challenge the transgender doctrine, while the brilliant Canadian academic Jordan Peterson had a Cambridge fellowship recently rescinded for the same reason.
The author C S Lewis once wrote, “of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Sadly, that kind of earnest despotism now casts its shadow over our seats of learning.
‘Censorship and authoritarianism prevails on too many campuses’