The students who have turned their backs on Enlightenment
By Brendan O’Neill, The Australian:
When you hear the phrase student radical, what image comes to mind? A freewheeling warrior against The Man? A fighter for the right to party? A dandily dressed agitator for the powers-that-be to get off youngsters’ backs?
If so, you need to update your mind’s image bank. For the days of student leaders ripping up rule books and flirting with libertinism are long gone. Today’s student leaders tend to be stiff, illiberal and vulnerable to an attack of hives at the mere mention of words like fun, freedom or sex.
In the US, student rads have screamed controversial speakers off campus and set up “safe spaces” where students wounded by words can take refuge. Some of these spaces play soothing music and have colouring books, to make students feel warm and childlike. Seriously.
In Britain, student leaders have banned everything from Israeli representatives to lads’ mags to the wearing of sombreros (apparently that’s offensive to Latinos). More than 30 student unions have banned Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines on the basis it makes female students feel undervalued. Remember when it was Christian ladies with blue rinses, not students with purple dye-jobs, who banned raunchy pop to protect dainty women?
Now student leaders at the University of Sydney have threatened to deregister a student society called the Evangelical Union on the basis that its requirement members believe in Jesus is discriminatory.
Yep, that’s right: the world of student politics has become so instinctively illiberal that even the idea of a Christian society being made up only of Christians freaks out these bossy bureaucrats. So unversed are today’s student radicals in the history of freedom that they think a group of like-minded people getting together to share their beliefs is a foul form of separatism when actually it’s a little thing we like to call freedom of association.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
