Millennials were woke... the next generation is worse

If I was asked on a quiz show to come up with a single word that captured the dynamics of history, I would say backlash. I’m not the first to notice that the pendulum swings its way through time. Philosophers like Hegel and Foucault, with their “dialectics” of history, got there quite a while back.

In the modern era, backlash dynamics also characterise generational sensibilities. Thus if the guiding spirit of the 1950s was stiffness and repression, the 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion in experimentation and looseness.

Given that we are all living in a world reshaped by millennials (and academics) obsessed with curbing free speech, one might have thought that those coming down the line next – Gen Z – would want to go the other way and rebel against the Jacobin excesses of their elders.

Not so. Last week, results from a study from the Higher Education Policy Institute, an independent think tank, found that anti-free speech attitudes among university students had greatly increased in 2022, compared to 2016. Today’s students would have made Stalin proud, so keen are they on controlling who can say what.

Most want offending statues removed (76 per cent, up from 51 per cent in 2016), and are in favour of safe spaces (62 per cent, up from 48 per cent). They hate offending speech, and think “safety” from hurtful speech is the top priority, over and above freedom, or accuracy, of expression. Nearly half (40 per cent) want student unions to simply ban all speakers that cause “offence” to students, up from 16 per cent in 2016.

Like good little Stalinists, they’re also very keen on mandatory reeducation programmes: more than half (55 per cent) want staff to undergo “training” about other cultures so they don’t offend, up from 16 per cent in 2016.

Lecturers who commit the unspeakable crime of “teach[ing]

‘One might have thgought that Gen Z would want to rebel against the Jacobin excesses of their elders’

material that heavily offends some students” (for example the history of most things including empire; all of canonical Western literature) ought to be sacked, according to a third of students.

This isn’t going to go away on its own. What to do? Universities that collaborate with students in aggressive curtailment of free speech (for instance, those that discipline staff for teaching “offensive” material) should be defunded. But students must lead the fight-back and, if universities don’t listen, take their business elsewhere. The University of Austin, the first free-speech university, launched in Texas last week. It’s a start.