Students are revolting – but adults are to blame
Today’s undergraduates mix naivety with tyranny – aided by the Left-wing academics who dominate universities
Cambridge University Students’ Union (trigger warning: violent metaphor) has come under fire for ruling that the presence of soldiers at freshers’ fair could “detrimentally affect” students’ mental health, voting through a motion banning any society, such as the cadets, from bringing firearms along to the event. In 2018, CUSU also voted down a motion to promote Remembrance Sunday amid fears it could “glorify” conflict.
Coming from the university that produced Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Maclean, this all seems relatively small beer. But it embodies the entitled victimhood engulfing our campuses and, increasingly, public life – the jarring mixture of performative frailty with a decidedly totalitarian instinct. Some have contrasted student behaviour of today with previous generations of undergraduates who served their nation in existential wars. There is some truth to this, but it misses a broader point.
Undergraduates now may not possess the stoic courage of Rupert Brooke, facing death while yearning for the blooming lilacs of Grantchester. Yet how many of us – whether anxietyridden millennials or binge-drinking baby boomers – embody the resilience, discipline or self-sacrifice of the war generation? Students have long been less patriotic than the general public, and often adopt extreme stances pour épater la bourgeoisie.
In 1933, the Oxford Union debated and carried the now-notorious motion “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”, prompting the Union’s short-term financial ruin as traditionally-minded fathers refused to pay their sons’ subscriptions. Student life in the Sixties was famed for its activism, albeit without today’s censoriousness. Youthful fervour often proves fleeting, just as many of those who supported the 1933 motion ultimately fought and died for King and Country.
What has shifted is the broader climate of debate, for which adults are equally culpable. Scratch the surface and university staff are often found leading the latest assault on free speech or tedious wokeness drive – Cambridge has specialised in this kind of gesture politics. “Social justice” mobs demanding the scalps of dissenting academics can only succeed with the help of willing allies in the faculty. The question is not why students are revolting, but why adults keep giving into them.
It doesn’t help that the professoriate has become dominated by the Left. The author Jonathan Haidt believes this shift to be demographic; politically diverse academics from the “greatest generation” retiring in the Nineties were replaced by Left-leaning baby boomers, veterans of the ’68 generation. One recent report by the Adam Smith Institute estimated that fewer than 12 per cent of UK academics would vote for a Right-wing party. This minority, occasionally visible in science or economics faculties, is virtually extinct in fields like literature and sociology – and many stay silent in practice, fearing reprisals.
That academics have moved Left, while the public has not, exacerbates a cultural chasm between graduates and non-graduates, most obvious in the case of Brexit. Yet the implications of campus monoculture are dwarfed by the intellectual harm to students.
CUSU’S attitude symbolises so much about what has gone wrong: the wilful refusal to accept reality and a complete lack of empathy for anyone who sees things differently. The failure to recognise war and defence as unavoidable realities goes further than naivety – it suggests deep intellectual shortcomings. It is a case study in more than anti-military sentiment.
It needn’t be like this. Last week, Andrew Parker, the bursar of St John’s College Oxford, offered the perfect riposte to a group of students calling for the college to abandon its fossil fuel investments. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he replied. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating to be switched off with immediate effect.”
The protesters, predictably, branded his words “inappropriate and flippant”. Yet this simple reply serves as an antidote to our febrile environmental debate, at once challenging his students and highlighting unexplored complexities. Sadly, Parker and his ilk are in the vanishing minority. Our universities have become havens for groupthink – the very thing they were established to counteract.