Minister hits out at snowflake students
STUDENTS should stop spending all their time on ‘identity politics’ and instead focus on the world’s big challenges, the universities minister has said.
Sam Gyimah warned that many youngsters are obsessed with talking about a ‘narrow set’ of issues such as race, gender and class.
Too much energy has been spent on deciding whether or not certain views are ‘offensive’ and how to ‘tack and trim’ around them, he said.
His remarks come as the concept of ‘offence’ is dominating student politics, with ‘snowflake’ youngsters hotly debating whether it is right to police speeches in case the speaker upsets women, transgender people or ethnic minorities.
Speaking at King’s College London on Thursday, Mr Gyimah said: ‘A university’s job is to promote free speech.
‘What universities should be promoting is wider debate, and what seems to be happening is a narrow debate around a narrow set of issues where there are entrenched positions, and that is not the way.’
He said he would like to see lecturers encouraging students to look beyond the university bubble and to engage in topics that might be less familiar to them.
Mr Gyimah, an Oxford graduate who was born to Ghanaian parents, added that while course content may be diverse, the ‘atmosphere’ on campuses was not.