Oxford students are acting like ignorant children

Activists such as those who want to ban Kathleen Stock have been indulged by universities for too long

Two stories about the University of Oxford have been in the press, and they are related. One, apparently trivial, concerns the provision of colouring pencils so that stressed undergraduates, coming up to their exams, can ease the tension by drawing pictures in their libraries.

The other, decidedly serious, concerns the attempts made by activists at Oxford University Student Union to prevent Kathleen Stock, the feminist writer and victim of persecution by the trans movement, from speaking in Oxford.

They are linked by the infantilisation and indulgence of students in Oxford and all our universities. Two years ago in Cambridge, lecturers were even told by the university that they must “respect” the views of their students. This could have entailed indulging them in their errors and false ideas. Thankfully, a rebellion of the dons overturned the stipulation and Cambridge supervisors remained free to criticise and correct.

Students entering universities today lack understanding of the purpose of a liberal education. They have read less than previous generations because their schooling and A-level courses demand less of them. To get to Cambridge in the 1970s, I sat 15 hours of examinations; today students applying to my Oxford faculty take a two-hour examination only.

School-leavers are encouraged to think of university as a meal-ticket rather than a period for learning and self-development.

Even very clever students enter university without adequate preparation or understanding of the principles that underpin academic life. Voltaire was the most eloquent defender of free speech; hardly any of my students at 18 years of age had heard of him.

In a world where students are paying customers, undergraduates write reports on lecturers, and tutors go in fear of complaints, instructing students in the high standards expected of them, treating them as adults, and threatening them with serious punishment if they abridge the rights of others, is much more difficult than in the past. Providing colouring pencils doesn’t help.

In this particular argument in Oxford, there is an obvious remedy and it would be good to see it used: the university should simply threaten to defund the Student Union.

Oxford has a statutory duty to uphold freedom of speech, and it is the university that largely funds Oxford SU, just as the individual Oxford colleges fund and support their junior common rooms.

If students demonstrate immaturity by failing to respect fundamental academic principles, the university and colleges should not indulge or continue to infantilise them.

They should expect students to live in the adult world – and withhold funding from organisations acting in breach of their responsibilities to uphold the values of any higher education worth having.

Before doing this, however, they should hold seminars on the history and purpose of free speech, because so many students seem not to understand the central ideas of the liberal democracy in which they live.

Make them read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, texts that very few of them will have encountered, with ideas from the past that will challenge their small-minded self-satisfaction. If then they want to ban Kathleen Stock, take away their funds.

There have always been issues over freedom of expression on campus: it would be a dull and defective university that didn’t sometimes have to deal with them.

But everyone should start these disputes with a clear understanding that free speech within the law cannot be abridged. Freedom of expression is the mark of a mature society, and of the intellectual and emotional maturity of students within it.

Those Oxford students who think otherwise should be made to address their academic deficiencies and, in this case, pay their own bills. The university’s collusion in their infantilisation should stop.