No gory details for Oxford law students
Widdecombe
WE ARE becoming a nation of wimps. The latest manifestation is at Oxford University (that’s the great seat of learning where they seriously considered removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes because some students were offended by it, but won’t take action against a black student who tweeted racist abuse about a white waitress).
Apparently law students are being told they can leave lectures which focus on death or violence in case they find the details too distressing. Well it may be that some of the poor, sensitive lambs have already decided that they will make their careers in tax law or be company secretaries but the simple fact of life is that most practitioners of law have to deal with the horrible in just the same way that ordinary souls on jury duty do, the only difference being that the jury didn’t choose that as a career.
So distressing was the tape of the ordeal of one of the Moors Murderers’ young victims that the judge heard it with his face averted. The barristers and their juniors had to sit through it too. The solicitors for both sides had to know the details as did the clerk of the court and anyone else present on duty. So did the police involved in the prosecution.
Of course not every case plumbs such depths but rape, serious violence and other horrors are everyday fare in law courts and anybody who is going to be made faint by them should eschew law as a profession. Even in civil law there can be horror.
Oxford apparently does not even confine its nannying to law students but allows English students to leave the room or cover up passages of poetry which contain racial slurs. Oh, spare me! What next? Banning The Merchant Of Venice because its portrayal of Shylock is antiSemitic?
Students bright enough to be at Oxford know well enough that literature down the ages and across the globe will reflect the thinking of time and place rather than conform to modern-day niceties.
Will it spread to history too? Will texts be redacted so that students are in no danger of finding out what hanging, drawing and quartering actually meant? Will medical students be excused anything a bit too graphic by way of human injury?
If Oxford students are not expected to be robust in the face of uncomfortable truths then their education is failing to prepare them for anything beyond AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood.
HOW I FOUND MYSELF UNABLE TO ORDER COPIES OF MY OWN BOOK
IF there was one organisation that I always believed was not paralysed by the rule book or by nannying instincts it was Amazon, with its customer-focused ethos, quick delivery and vast range. I was wrong.
On Saturday I tried to order 20 copies of my own, Amazon-published book, The Dancing Detective. I have done this regularly but the system suddenly allowed me only eight and rejected an attempt to order more.
As I needed the books for a literary festival I rang the helpline and was told that when stock is limited Amazon restricts the number each customer can order so that “one person doesn’t get 100 and the next none”. Laying aside the very questionable right of Amazon to police its orders like Nanny sharing sweets, the book is print on demand so the question of stock does not arise. It is not a first edition of Harry Potter and customers may have many legitimate reasons for ordering a largish batch. Inevitably the girl on the desk told me “there was nothing she could do”.
I frustrated their idiocy by asking friends to order me eight each so now I have 32 books arriving. It is so typical of modern commerce that it would hardly be worth mentioning if it hadn’t come from such a very unexpected quarter.