It’s no wonder degrees are going out of fashion when universities have become the Madrassas of the Left

Aug 19, 2018 by Jill

by Toby Young, Mailonline:

For anyone hoping to get into university, this year’s wait for A-level results has been a little less nerve-racking than normal.

Applications for degree courses are significantly down. Britain’s most prestigious universities have been left with thousands of unfilled places and even teenagers falling well short of the grades they hoped for have been given a second chance.

Good news for them, perhaps. But what does this say about the state of our elite institutions, the universities at the supposed pinnacle of our education system?

[…] This dominance of the Left in university departments – particularly in the arts and humanities, where the number of Conservative supporters falls to five per cent – means that students who don’t subscribe to liberal orthodoxy can feel isolated.

Think of the rampant identity politics that has seen demands for the removal of memorials to long-dead ‘imperialists’ such as Cecil Rhodes, whose statue stands at Oriel College, Oxford. Or the mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If in Manchester University’s students’ union building, defaced on the grounds that the Nobel Prize-winning author was a ‘white supremacist’. Or the hounding of Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar by his academic colleagues for daring to suggest the British empire wasn’t an unmitigated evil. Apparently, he should not have drawn attention to the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade.

Add to this the vipers’ nest that is student politics, with its vigilant policing of thought crimes, such as ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’ and ‘ableism’ – although not anti-Semitism, which has become a defining characteristic of the Corbynite Left – and the aggressive no-platforming of anyone with Right-of-centre political views, and is it any wonder that some smart school-leavers have decided that going to university is just not worth it?

We HAVE seen the treatment meted out to dissenters – not least to those undergraduates who dared to vote Brexit and were brave enough to say so – and the violent protest against Jacob Rees-Mogg when he attempted to give a speech at the University of the West of England.

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