Life IS complicated .. so let’s not give in to the wails of these monstrous toddlers
THE culture wars are raging on our university campuses, but ministers have gone AWOL — no doubt seeking sanctuary under their desks.
Each day brings news of fresh casualties as academics or students with flawless records are smeared or ‘cancelled’ for failing to toe the ‘woke’ line.
Their crimes amount to nothing more than voicing a perspective that runs contrary to the politically correct consensus, but the price paid can be steep.
In Kingsley Amis’s classic comic novel Lucky Jim, published in the 1950s, senior university figures are mercilessly mocked for their pretensions, albeit largely behind their backs.
By the time of The History Man by Malcom Bradbury, a satire set in the 1970s, students and indeed their lecturers back trendy causes, staging sit-ins and waving placards.
Fast-forward to today and you will still find the right-on crowd, but this time they’re more of a censorious mob — shutting down anyone who disagrees with them.
Tactics include no-platforming, where speakers with ‘problematic’ views are banned, or simply levelling serious accusations at those who fall foul of the PC brigade.
In the case of Dr Neil Thin, a social anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh, his offence was to defend one of Scotland’s greatest philosophers, David Hume, who stood accused of racism more than 300 years after his death.
Hume had slavery links — or so we’re told — and was ‘cancelled’ last year when a building commemorating his legacy was re-named.
Dr Thin withdrew from teaching and is under investigation — though some of his student critics are also being probed for calling him a ‘crusty old man’ in private social media conversations.
Are Dr Thin’s detractors really high-minded campaigners against racism — or ageists, guilty of the bigotry they publicly deplore?
That said, those who make complaints of this kind tend to remain anonymous, whereas the targets of their scorn are at least putting their heads above the parapet.
Dr Thin’s long career is on the line, and I’ve had emails from some of his fellow academics who support him and despair of the tyranny of the ‘wokerati’.
Then there’s Lisa Keogh, a law student who could be expelled from university after saying women have vaginas and are not as physically strong as men.
She is fighting disciplinary action brought against her by Abertay University in Dundee, after her comments were deemed to be ‘discriminatory’.
The 29-year-old was reported by younger classmates after she said women were born with female genitals, and stated that it was ‘a fact’ that there was a difference in the physical strength of men and women.
Compounding her offence, she also objected to a lecturer allegedly saying that ‘all men are rapists’.
Gender identity is at the core of many of the woke disputes in higher education and elsewhere, but what’s remarkable is that at Abertay it became a disciplinary matter.
Whatever you think of what this student said, why shouldn’t she be permitted to say it — or why should she get into trouble for voicing views that are widely shared (the claim that all men are rapists, for example, is demonstrably false)?
In The History Man, a prescient tale about the rise of campus activism, achingly trendy sociology lecturer Howard Kirk circulates a false rumour about an impending visit by a controversial geneticist called Mangel.
The prospect of Mangel coming to the campus sparks a backlash from enraged students — and Howard is injured as the resulting demonstration gets out of control.
More than 40 years on, there’s a similar sense of manufactured outrage — Howard would doubtless approve of re-naming the David Hume Tower.
But there’s also a suggestion of complicity between woke students and the university bosses who entertain their often spurious complaints, siding with them over their own staff.
Last week we reported that sickened academics have set up a website to share stories of ‘monstrous toddler’ students who are helping to stifle free speech, and silencing the lecturers who dare to speak their minds.
One entry relating to the University of Edinburgh states: ‘It is as though academic colleagues believe there are some trans/trans ally students who are monstrous toddlers, ready to throw a strop if they hear anything that invalidates their “true self” and report the offending tutor to the Staff Pride Network Committee, widely seen as bullies.’
Students are also mollycoddled with ‘trigger warnings’ — read out before lectures that might prove harrowing.
In one case highlighted by the Mail, students at Glasgow University were warned that a course about fairy-tales could upset them.
Certain texts are verboten — Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, admittedly a gory play, but no worse than your average Tarantino movie, is now regarded as too problematic for student consumption.
At St Andrews University in the 1990s, I studied Money by Martin Amis — seen by many as his masterpiece.
There were complaints from some women on the course that it was chauvinist and they hadn’t got to the end of it.
The protagonist, John Self, is a pretty unedifying character — a pornography enthusiast and a drunk — but it’s a bit of a leap to suggest the novel or the novelist is sexist.
Yet nowadays Money might not be top of the list for inclusion on a reading list.
Happily, St Andrews bosses are no fans of trigger warnings, but it’s clear that since then there has been a general drift towards censorship — the cancellation of anything that might be offensive, or make anyone uncomfortable.
Indeed the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University has appointed a ‘curator of discomfort’ to address how its collections have helped perpetuate the legacy of ‘white supremacy’.
The Hunterian Museum said historical racist ideologies had been ‘used to justify looting and plundering’ and it wanted to ‘rewrite the narrative’ on artefacts donated by explorers and missionaries.
Yet history can’t, or shouldn’t be airbrushed, and the same applies to literature; life’s complicated — and uncomfortable — and students shouldn’t be shielded from it.
Mind you, they aren’t just learners — in many cases they’re customers; students from England and overseas pay tuition fees.
That means university managers have to listen to them, adhering to the old adage that the customer is always right.
But the customer isn’t always right — that’s all too plain from some of the woke rows we’ve seen playing out in recent months.
Universities don’t exist in a vacuum; they mirror and shape the debate beyond their walls, and ultimately principals have paymasters too.
They’re in receipt of eye-wateringly large salaries made possible only by the largesse of the taxpayer, but it’s ministers who hold the purse-strings.
As we’ve seen in the last few days, ministers have been vocal enough on any number of PC causes — but when it comes to clamping down on the woke mob, their silence is positively monastic.
In the meantime, free speech is becoming a thing of the past as student radicalism takes on a nastier edge — and for now the ‘monstrous toddlers’ are ruling the roost.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on May 18, 2021.
