The closing of the university mind
by Melanie Phillips:
It’s why so many, in institutions across the board, are now so incompetent.
The Times reported this week on the deeply alarming findings (£) of a survey it had conducted at Britain’s universities.
It found that ten of them, including three from the elite Russell Group, had started removing books from reading lists or made them optional to protect students from “challenging” content, and had applied trigger warnings to more than 1,000 texts in case they “caused students harm”.
Paul Morgan-Bentley and James Beal wrote:
The texts include the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, which has been “removed permanently” from a course reading list at Essex University because of concerns about graphic depictions of slavery.
The classic play Miss Julie, by August Strindberg, has been withdrawn from an English literature module at Sussex University because it includes discussion of suicide.
English students at Aberdeen University are also told they can opt out of discussions on a module about Geoffrey Chaucer and medieval writing as the course “sometimes entails engagement with topics that you may find emotionally challenging”…
Some of Britain’s most influential authors — including William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie — are among those whose works have been deemed concerning enough to require warnings.
There may well be more instances of lecturers protecting students from challenging literature. Academics attempted to block this newspaper from discovering details about changes to their reading lists, using social media to encourage each other not to comply with requests for information. Some universities refused to disclose any information because of the “potentially negative personal impact” on staff.
The same day, The Times carried another report (£) that a group of hard-left academics had been plotting a witch-hunt against colleagues over gender identity. James Beal wrote:
University and College Union (UCU) members pledged to compile a list of university backroom staff suspected of holding gender-critical beliefs, the minutes from a meeting leaked to The Times reveal. The plan was to use this information to “inform” UCU university branches of their colleagues’ views, accusing them of being “transphobes” and “gender-critical activists”…
Leaked minutes also reveal the extent to which the UCU’s general secretary, Jo Grady, supported those accused of helping to force out Dr Kathleen Stock from Sussex University. Stock, 50, a philosophy professor, quit the university in October 2021 after what she described as a “bullying and harassment” campaign over her gender-critical beliefs.
These findings are shocking; but no-one who has been paying attention to what’s been happening to education in both Britain and America will find them surprising. On both sides of the Atlantic, the universities — with some exceptions, and with “hard” science departments exempt to some extent at least — have been steadily substituting knowledge and rational thought by “victim culture” and ideological identity politics on race and gender, turning themselves into left-wing bastions of propaganda and the suppression of dissent.
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