How a new generation of thin-skinned student activists are gagging young people
Going off to university used to be a shortcut to freedom yet now a generation of killjoys have stamped out free speech at British unis - and you'll be shocked to discover which are the most restrictive
UNIVERSITIES used to be defined by freedom.
Students were free to speak their minds, to read everything under the sun -- free to cut loose, away from their parents for the first time.
They were free to learn, argue and have fun. That was the deal, and what made campus life so attractive.
But no longer.
Now, censorship reigns on campus, and killjoy student authorities restrict everything from what speakers are invited to what fancy dress students can wear.
University and students’ union bureaucrats don’t trust students to dress themselves, let alone think for themselves.
Today, the - the UK’s first university league table for campus censorship - are published.
I coordinate the research. We assess both universities and students’ unions policies on speech, conduct and external speakers and rank them using a traffic-light system.
Red means they actively censor speech, amber means they chill speech through burdensome regulation and vetting, and green means none of the above.
Tragically, the results this year make for grim reading.
Restrictions on speech
We found that 55 per cent of universities and students’ unions now actively censor speech, banning speakers and views deemed beyond the pale.
The University of Oxford and Newcastle University were the two most restrictive, meaning they ban certain ideas, speakers and texts.
Meanwhile, the University of Buckingham, the University of Wales Trinity St David and Hertfordshire University came out on top, meaning they placed no restrictions on speech.
In the last year alone, we’ve seen a UKIP MEP cancel his talk at the University of Sussex after he refused to have his speech pre-screened, Durham University ban a ‘Thatchers vs the Miners’ party, and feminist campaigner Linda Bellos disinvited from addressing the Cambridge University Beard Society over her comments on transgenderism.
Clearly, it’s not just clear-cut hatemongers being banned or protested on campus, as some students’ unions would have us believe.
Student activists at Cardiff tried to ban feminist author Germaine Greer in 2015, as she, like Bellos, was deemed ‘transphobic’.
Maryam Namazie, a secularist campaigner who escaped the Iranian theocracy and campaigns against Islamism’s treatment of women, was banned by one students’ union for fear she would offend Muslim students.
Students’ unions and small groups of student activists are by far the most intolerant forces on campuses.
They claim to censor in the name of protecting students, but students are often the targets of their censorship.
We’ve found that 17 institutions have censored or punished students for offensive speech and conduct over the past three years.
Last year, the University of Bristol Students’ Union forced its Cheerleading Society to cancel its chav-themed social event, because it was deemed ‘classist’ - despite the fact many of the cheerleaders were from working-class backgrounds.
Whether students are trying to have a jokey night out, inviting a controversial speaker or expressing their deepest held moral convictions, they can find themselves punished and shamed.
The rise of censorship on campus
The National Union of Students’ No Platform policy, which bans certain far-right and Islamist groups, has been in place since the early 1970s.
But, over the past few years, the bar for what is censored has become lower and lower, and universities themselves are increasingly getting in on the act.
There is a new generation of uniquely thin-skinned student activists, brought up in a culture that seems to nurture self-esteem over robustness, and which preaches the multicultural idea that we should shy away from challenging certain cultural and religious ideas for fear of giving offence.
This collides with an increasingly bureaucratised campus administration, beholden to "student satisfaction" surveys, and keen to avoid the bad press generated by students being free to fool about on a night out or host an edgy speaker.
There is an unholy alliance between distant, unrepresentative student activists who demand censorship in the name of protecting students, and a cowardly university administration all too willing to cave into their demands.
A dark, bleak future?
So what does this censorious climate mean for education?
It means a new endarkenment on campus, in which important debates are closed down where once they would be opened up.
No less than 48 per cent of universities, including Warwick and Lincoln, restrict or regulate discussion of religion, for fear of ‘offending’ faith groups.
On campus today, it seems, there are blasphemies, both new and old, that students commit at their peril.
If universities are to continue to be places of learning, of debate and argument, then we need to dismantle this culture of censorship.
The newly set up higher education regulator, the Office for Students, has laid out plans to do so by fining or sanctioning universities that fail to stop censorship.
But this simply won’t work.
It’s fighting one form of illiberalism with another, and it won’t touch students’ unions which are independent organisations that, rightly, shouldn’t be controlled by the state.
And anyway, the fracas at UWE Bristol on Friday night, in which a talk by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was disrupted by protesters, showed that when universities don’t censor, illiberal students will take matters into their own hands.
Call to action
The answer is for students to remake the case for freedom on campus and protest censorship wherever and whenever it happens. Thankfully, there are signs that suggest students are beginning to fight back.
When City Students’ Union banned tabloid newspapers, students on its famed journalism course protested, mobbing the union with copies of the offending newspapers, leading to the ban being overturned.
At Aberystwyth, students successfully organised to reverse a ban on the social-media app YikYak.
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But there’s a world out there to win.
Students must make clear in action and argument that censorship -- whether it is enforced by diktat or by mob -- has no place on campus.
Only then will universities be truly free again.
Tom Slater is deputy editor at and coordinator of the .