The students are revolting
by Miriam Cates MP, Artillery Row:
Far too many young people are sheltered from the real world by their university education.
Over recent weeks, British University vice-chancellors have no doubt been monitoring the situation in the US with concern, wondering when the increasingly volatile student protests would spread across the Atlantic and into British campuses.
Well, they’re here now, and the ‘occupation’ of Oxford and Cambridge Universities by keffiyar-clad undergraduates is a truly unedifying spectacle. I’m sure many of the students involved feel strongly about the war in the Middle East and are — like the rest of us — appalled by the human suffering in the region. But given the many other conflicts, atrocities and inequalities taking place across the world, it would appear that motivation for these protests is not so much trying to bring about a ceasefire, but more a performative demonstration of the anti-Israel — and anti-Jewish — sentiment that is being displayed by students in the US.
Perhaps unwisely, I tweeted my thoughts on this matter, saying:
It seems I have inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest; this post has amassed nearly 2m views, provoking an extraordinary amount of outrage and vitriolic abuse. Reading through some of the ‘comments’, it is clear that there is a lack of critical thinking — amongst Twitter users at least — about the merits or otherwise of our higher education ecosystem.
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