I’m intrigued and alarmed in equal measure by what’s going on in universities, where a new generation of students seem to be setting the agenda.
Long ago I gleaned from Cardinal Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’ that it was a place of intellectual enquiry where students were encouraged to expand their horizons under the tutelage of expert minds and be exposed to the best that civilisation has to offer.
For my generation, university was a hard-earned privilege where we were expected to behave responsibly, work hard and absorb the intellectual riches on offer. Not all of us fulfilled these three criteria. Like all idealistic adolescents, we kicked against authority, but not strenuously enough to be kicked out, espoused various causes and sat up all night passionately theorising and earnestly positing half-baked ideas that would revolutionise society, as every generation of students did before us. For the most part, we graduated humbler, wiser, intellectually enriched – and grateful for the experience.
Today’s university students are a different breed – and generating distinct disquiet in the groves of academe. It’s our fault of course. The present flush of undergraduates have been reared with the idea that they’re special. Products of a coddled, over-protective rearing, very much indulged, they’ve rarely experienced either contradiction or disappointment. They have a strong sense of their rights, an even stronger sense of entitlement and are used to having every whim pandered to, every feeling validated.
Few parents would admit the balance of power within families has shifted in favour of their self-centred young and we are reaping the fruits of it in education, from nursery to university. Not for nothing are they known as ‘the snowflake generation’. Their sensitivities are such that, when faced with difficulty, an opinion that differs from their own or a firm “No”, they complain, object, take offence or all three. Anything that displeases them they label inappropriate, upsetting, stressful or bullying.
These are the attitudes they bring with them to university where the authorities further feather-bed them by ‘trigger warnings’ of what elements of their course content could prove disturbing. Thus, theology students are given prior notice that graphic scenes of the Crucifixion may be disturbing, veterinary students that they’ll be working with dead animals, forensic science students with bodies, blood and crime scenes and archaeology students “may find mummified remains a bit gruesome”. These forewarnings they justify by saying, “It helps to protect the mental health of vulnerable students”. What did they expect?
As a further sop to the snowflakes, lecturers in several universities have been banned from using ‘gendered’ words or phrases considered to be discriminatory, so mankind becomes ‘humanity’, man made, ‘artificial’ and forefathers, ‘ancestors’. Also, God must not be referred to as ‘He’ but ‘the one who’. Gawdelpusall!
Having lost the run of themselves, students are militating for the removal of statues of philanthropists who endowed their colleges because they were ‘imperialists’ exploiting the colonies. Oh, the irony of a Rhodes scholar insisting on the banishment of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the man whose money is subsidising his education – and another student body lobbying for a name change of their college because its benefactor’s business was based on slavery. As somebody famous said, “We can’t dry-clean history.”
Student Unions, once the forum of fiery debate and the privilege of hearing guests of note whose wisdom, experience and often contentious opinions opened the minds of undergraduates are banning speakers they disagree with and turning the chamber into a ‘safe space’ where no-one’s allowed to challenge their prejudices.
This is the infantilisation of third level education. Can’t they see the idiocy of banning sombreros and other forms of ethnic costume at fancy-dress balls? And the fatuous proposal of the National Union of Students that audiences show approval by ‘jazz hands’ instead of applause because “clapping causes anxiety”.
University’s a place where we discover a voice, cultivate opinions and defend them – but not to the arrogant and arbitrary silencing of others.
Apropos of nothing – a recent survey of university campuses has discovered that 94 per cent of colleges have, to some degree, curbs on freedom of expression and speech.
