Main Edition
US
FR
How safe is this space? Credit: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty
When are we going to do something about the state of our universities? We must surely by now be familiar with the symbols of this unfolding crisis. Philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was harassed by students and staff to such an extent that she was forced to leave her position at the University of Sussex. Noah Carl, the promising research fellow, who was chased out of Cambridge. Tony Sewell, the government advisor who oversaw the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities before suddenly finding his offer of an honorary doctorate at the University of Nottingham withdrawn. Tim Luckhurst, the Principal at Durham who invited Rod Liddle to speak at a dinner and was then suspended after students demanded he be disciplined.
These are only four of the 137 academics or speakers who have, since the mid 2010s been banned from Britain’s campuses, faced student-led campaigns to silence them, or have simply been sacked. But new research suggests that things are far worse than we thought — and getting worse.
The study by the Higher Education Policy Institute confirms we are facing a deep cultural problem that is becoming more pronounced with each generation. Crucially, unlike studies in the past, the Institute tracked the attitudes of a representative sample of university students over the past six years, between 2016, the tumultuous year of the Brexit referendum, and today. The findings are devastating.
They point to a new generation of university students who are increasingly supportive of removing from campus words, books, ideas, speakers, and events they find uncomfortable or offensive. This generation have been raised to prioritise their “emotional safety” above all else, and are more willing to impose restrictions on others, to curtail views they disagree with.
In their highly influential work in America, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warn that universities and colleges are increasingly characterised by what they call “vindictive protectiveness” — a push to transform these institutions into “safe spaces” where students are shielded from words and ideas that make them uncomfortable, and where anyone who questions or challenges this orthodoxy is either ostracised or punished.
This is, clearly, now happening in Britain. Student support for refusing to sell tabloid newspapers on campus, on the grounds of sexism, has rocketed 24 points, to 62%. Support for banning speakers who offend students has more than doubled, to 39%. Support for firing academics if they “teach material that heavily offends some students” has also more than doubled, to 36% — that’s over a third of undergraduates who would support the removal of lecturers and professors they perceived to be offensive.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe elephant in the room is that universities are now dominated by women, and women don’t believe in the open outcry of the male Culture of Insult and the confrontation of ideas in the public square.
“Emotional safety” is a girl thing.
“Safe spaces” is a girl thing.
“Purity” is a girl thing.
Over a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel said that women coming into the public square would change it to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”
But I have come to think that women don’t do the public square, because, in the culture of women, women don’t confront each other. Instead two women will get together and complain about a third woman: “I can’t believe she said/did that.”
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
AKA the toxic femininity we see pervading some many walks of life these days.
beat your chest and put on your bearskin thong caveman.
Why don’t you answer the criticisms that have been stated. This is just more name calling.
You’re absolutely right – and I say this as a woman. I couldn’t have put it any better. I don’t know what the answer is as, naturally, I don’t want to see women erased from universities.
I am reluctant to go that far, Judy, even as a man. When I sauntered into university for the first time I was confronted by women who were intellectually fearsome, so there must be more to it than Christopher Chantrill suggests.
As a generalisation, it’s interesting and has some truth. But clearly we can all think of women who wouldn’t step back from a public confrontation (UnHerd’s own Julie Bindel, Janet Street-Porter, Margaret Thatcher, …). Perhaps there just aren’t enough of them ?
Maybe there aren’t enough confrontational men. I am not trying to go against the flow here, but I find it difficult to accept that there is such a thing as the feminisation of society. I admit that I don’t know what the problem is.
“Maybe there aren’t enough confrontational men.”
Correct. A great many of today’s young men don’t have any b*lls. Perhaps it’s in the water.
Yes, imagine a Christopher Hitchens invited to speak at a university now. Imagine the great confrontation between Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer in the 60s – out and out confrontational debate. Do these personalities no longer exist, or have they been pushed to the sidelines?
Pushed to the sidelines.
Since you mention Germaine, I’d remind you that she memorably said:
“Just because you lop off your d**k and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f**cking woman. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a f**cking cocker spaniel.”
What a great woman!
The pill, getting in the water? Young men are the same as ever. They want one thing. Just a lot sneakier how they go about it.
Apparently not – young people, including men, have been shown as having much less interest in sex. Weird.
Young men are in a precarious position. At the last Title IX meeting I attended at my college, the topic of false r*pe accusations came up (this was in connection to the changes the Trump administration made to a preponderance of evidence policy, since reversed by the Biden administration). One female administrator was pretty blasé about it, stating that young men who are falsely accused still have the option of attending another university and that it might even be considered an educational experience to them.
I was the only person at the meeting who voiced vociferous disagreement by claiming that a false accusation can dog a man for the rest of his life. I’m at a loss as to what young men can do in such an environment. As for me, a middle-aged man, I was made to feel like I was defending r*pe culture.
Oddly enough, when you mention public figures, it seems that women are likely to be MORE outspoken than men. Of course they now have more ‘identity’ license to do so than men, although probably not right wing ones, where the so-called progressives rapidly descend to rampant and not-so-hidden misogyny!
Forgive me for saying, p, but you went to uni a little while ago! When we were both students women were still a minority. The atmosphere and culture was male. I think there’s a tipping point where half to a majority of women in a space transforms its culture. Of course, I’m generalising and I’m sure there are still intellectually fearsome women. But I hate to say it – I recognised Christopher Chantrill’s description of my gender from experience.
Okay Judy, I can’t challenge your knowledge of your own gender, but I spent much of my working life in university administration where, as a man, I was usually in the minority. I just don’t remember inhabiting a feminised workspace, which makes me suspect that there is more to this than meets the eye.
Yeah well. as you say, rock’n’roll was a long time ago.
Someone downvoted you and it wasn’t me. I dislike anonymous downvoting. If you disagree with someone then say so – don’t slink around in the shadows in an unmanly manner! Glad to see you around, by the way.
I am proud that I was the last member of my family to not go to university
I’m glad I didn’t marry a university graduate woman. It sounds terrible to me. Just think, these people are the future generation. It’s like a horror story waiting to happen.
Obviously there are exceptions–there are lots of individually tough, intellectually rigorous and not very easily offended women, and there are men who behave like the worst mean girls in the high school cafeteria….but as a cultural phenomenon the ascent of women is definitely skewing things, and not in a good direction. (I say this as woman with 4 university degrees.) I don’t know what the solution is either. But awareness of the problem is the first step.
I’m glad at least someone said it. Girls and feminised men.
But we cannot blame women for “feminised”, i.e. weak, men, surely. They did it all by themselves. Women are simply occupying spaces that men are vacating.
The feminisation of boys starts young, at home, and in education. You might want to read “The war on boys” by Christina Hoff Summers, or watch an interview with her. She describes the current plight well.
The pathologising of normal healthy male behaviour is now written into much of the education pedagogy taught in the West.
Naturally, much of this pedagogy is informed by Critical Theory.
What a mess we have got ourselves in…
Maybe this is so. And yet… I was raised by women, women who wanted me to behave like a man, albeit one who respected a woman’s sphere.
As you say what a mess we are in.
That you were raised in this way has little to do with and does not disprove the point that currently many boys in schools are being feminised. Look up the writer I mentioned…
But you said yourself that feminisation starts in the home. Are the mothers who raise them now so different from the mother whom raised me?
I will check out the writer.
I have this suspicion, inchoate as it is, that our real problem is that men are no longer being confronted with the challenges that evolution designed them to meet.
Yes, parenting has changed. Women are having fewer children, when they are older, This alone changes the nature of parenting.
Of course there will always be exceptions. That does not change the trend.
And the trend is amplified by the increasing number of children being raised in homes with no male adult.
As you say, more only children, raised by older women, with less adult male influence.
A lot of boys are on prescription drugs to keep them calm in the classroom, at least in my corner of the US.
Blimey. They should be sent to hunt mammoth for the tribe. That would sort them out.
More games and outdoor activity would help. There’s something a little perverse about a society that confines energetic young people to a classroom all day.
I think that’s classed as child abuse in the Uk.
Or that many of these boys don’t have fathers which can lead to this stuff.
You nailed it.
Nothing wrong with feminised men. But what we surely need is men who reject the violent stereotypes of manly men but who reject the ridiculous notion that this means they were “born in the wrong body” and who have come to terms with the intense emotions and motivations that testosterone induces in a male sexed body. We need a true warrior culture where men have been taught by older men how to be in the world in their own bodies, men who are strong and kind, powerful and sensitive, hard as nails and good listeners. If only I were fifty years younger ……
Feminised men are OK on perfume counters, or in haberdashery stores. But they are useless in situations requiring muscle, courage and physical/technical problem-solving.
‘Bang-in a nail, darling’
Apart from this being an extremely sweeping (and, might I say, openly misogynistic) generalisation (I, as a woman, very much believe in the confrontation of ideas in the public square, as you call it)…what is your solution? Ban all women from “the public square” (whatever that means in practice)? Tell women to “stop being feminine” (whatever that means)? Impose controls on perceived “female” traits (whatever they are…)?
Keep it civil Katharine! He wasn’t being misogynistic.
I am justified in my response and make no apology whatsover. Laying all the problems of the university establishment at the feet of some vague idea of femininity/suposed female traits is 100% the opposite of civil: I do not throw around the M word lightly but it is correct to use it in regard to this post. It is downright insulting and with no real proof beyond a certain “feeling”, a very weak argument. He said “women don’t believe in open confrontation”? Really? Well here’s one who does and who is going to do it. Unashamedly.
You didn’t throw the M word around lightly, Katharine, merely inaccurately. So you disagree with him. Okay, but that isn’t the definition of misogyny.
Katharine,
This grouse is directed not at you, but at the Unherd voting system. I just upvoted your comment only to see your count go from -6 to -7. I then tried downvoting and your count rose – correctly – to -8. So you have 2 unwarranted downvotes from me! How on earth can I upvote someone who already has a negative count? Help please, someone.
Upvoting a negative count reduces the number of downvotes.
(-7) + 1= -6.
Makes sense.
Also consider that there may be people who lurk here, never posting and may even enjoy upsetting people. I don’t always post if I have just a minor disagreement with a poster. Likewise some (many?) of my upvotes may mean “well, yes, OK then” as I sweep on to the next. There’s no stamping or soft pedal. Maybe, apart from answering a post, we should have a range of dis/agreement.
A woman fixing a man’s maths! That bucks a few stereotypes in this discussion!
Same happened to me Michael, so that makes two more upvotes for Katherine. I am slightly shocked (and disgusted) but not entirely surprised at the misogyny in some of the comments.
If you upvote a post that has a negative score then you reduce the total negative score by 1. If you are voting at the same as other people, then indeed it can be difficult to keep tally!
Have you considered that more than one vote may have been registered at roughly the same time?
You seem to believe that ‘confronting’ an idea means getting upset by it.
Ignore this. I accidentally responded to the wrong post.
Sock it to them Katharine. It is much needed.
Very well said, as I just stated , lots of fragile egos being dented here.
She was being civil. Indicate where she wasn’t, or withdraw your comment.
Whilst I think he did make his point in a clumsy manner, your response rather proves his.
No it doesn’t. It disproves it. The complaint made is that women don’t “do” confrontation and the robust exchange of ideas and that’s where this is all going wrong. Well here’s a woman who LOVES confrontation and the robust exchange of ideas and who doesn’t give two hoots about any antiquated ideas about what a woman is/isn’t or should/shouldn’t be like. He has his ideas, which I think is wrong. I have mine – and I will express them. As robustly as I feel the situation permits. I have not gone too far.
It is absolutely unhelpful – even perverse – to frame the problem in terms of “feminine” and “masculine” traits. What are they anyway – beyond physical characteristics?
May I refer you to my previous comment.
I’m sure you love confrontation. The point is most women don’t.
My wife is a very empathising person but when someone is unfairly in trouble she turns into a tiger and I have to admire her. Amazing gal.
How can you make this comment, you DONT KNOW most women, put your shirt back on and stop beating your chest with your fists.
But the way you’re confronting him is to call names and attack his character.
Take him on with facts if he’s wrong but so far all you’re doing is supporting his assertion.
But she’s still confronting him, like it or not, wait a sec, do you think, the audacity, a woman confronting a man, how dare she !!!
Exactly!
@Katharine Eyre,
You wrote, ‘It is absolutely unhelpful – even perverse – to frame the problem in terms of “feminine” and “masculine” traits. What are they anyway – beyond physical characteristics?’
And I would answer that failure to recognize the natural differences between men and women, of which physical characteristics are merely an outward manifestation, is a diagnostic symptom of the social problem.
A robust exchange of views doesn’t have to involve over-emotional responses or SHOUTING. It just adds credibility to CC’s original thesis.
All the males are up in arms, just proves she is right, misogyny is alive and kicking.
There are some people who are downvoting you Katharine. I think it is rediculous as I think you speak a lot of sense. Confronting can be more honest than talking behind someone’s back which seems to be happening a lot in the universities. Is this the end of Britain when they all come out looking for jobs. The only safe place would be working for government I think if one cannot face the real world.
Spoken like a true man.
How so? She seems confrontational enough to me.
Could be overcompensating
Most men I know take care of their kids, enjoy it and are happy about it – unlike their previous generation. That’s because men accept the need to change or adapt.
The problem with portraying women as “victims” is that they have an entitled attitude and believe they themselves have no issues, have no need to change
And that is the solution – not babbling about evil men trying to “ban” women, but accepting that women need to change.
Stop being so defensive about criticism, stop demanding “safety”, stop blaming and complaining and get on with it, speak clearly and straight to the point. Men have done it for millennia, and if you want to enter male spaces you have to follow the rules and best practices. They are there for a reason.
“Most men I know take care of their kids, enjoy it and are happy about it – unlike their previous generation.”
The height of arrogance. Most men always loved their children and the further back you go the more they sacrificed.
Fathers where I grew up actually risked their lives in mines or heavy industry or in farming to look after their children.
Idiotic thing to say.
Agree with you but that’s not what I meant. Of course men who died in war or mines loved their families, but it was accepted that taking care of the children and the house was the woman’s side of things. In a way, those men lost out of the joy of watching your kids grow.
But hardly any man I know thinks that way. You still love your kids, but the role you play and how you behave has changed. And contrary to popular feminist perception, men have embraced that change. I know of plenty of high earning, career focussed men who love spending time with their kids and are very serious about being involved in their day to day lives.
How dare you speak for the rest of the male population, you are one voice, one that doesn’t speak much sense sadly.
I don’t see K as being “defensive about criticism” or “demanding safety.” I also think she spoke very clearly and to the point. What are you on about?
This is getting like the universities. How on earth do they learn anything?
I don’t think he has a clue.
It is no longer a case of women wanting to “ enter male spaces” ( ??? Mysogeny is alive and kicking on this site) . If women feel they are victims it’s probably because of the males, very loose description, with attitudes such as yours who seem to believe there really are ‘male spaces’. Do you have a desire to put on a dress, go into ladies toilets In order to prove you can invade their spaces and they do indeed have safety issues ?
I hear you confronting the tone of the argument by attacking it as misogynistic, but what are the actual ideas that you bring to the debate?
You bring forward (without evidence) the anecdotal claim that you (n=1) believe in the confrontation of ideas, but you explicitly do not oppose this evidence to the ‘sweeping generalisation’: your phrase is ‘apart from’.
Then you move onto arguments from pathos by speculating about plans to exclude women from the public square or deny them their femininity or control them.
The whole thing is emotional from start to finish. It rejects abstraction in favour of anecdote. There is not a single idea in there. It’s an almost too perfect example of the baleful influence inside a university of a certain feminine outlook.
Did you write it intending it as such a parody? If so, then brava!
And pray tell what ideas did Christopher Chantrell bring? Only the tired old blame feminism shtick (which I agree with to some extent) with no solutions, as K pointed out.
Baffling waffle, university graduate to a T.
The issue is not about a willingness to be confrontational. The issue is with how confrontation/conflicts are handled and why they arise in the first place. I think most people would agree that women have become increasingly confrontational—much like yourself—over the past few decades; however, in many cases, confrontations with and among women are less constructive due to an increased likelihood of devolving into emotional reactions.
Despite what feminists would like everyone to believe, men and women are not equivalent or fully interchangeable. We are very different physically, we have very different interests, our hormone levels are very different, and our environments respond to us in very different ways—as we do to them. Sure, there are exceptions, but the typical woman lives a life very different from that of the typical man. Female/feminine and male/masculine traits are derived from the differences between these lives. Women are typically more emotional and sensitive than men, which is why these are feminine traits. Unfortunately, these traits are not conducive to constructive conflict.
The reality is that women cannot be men; they can only pretend to be men. Rather than promoting the idea that men are equivalent to women and having so many people trying to imitate the opposite sex, society would be much better served by accepting the reality of our differences and using them to our advantage. If that offends some people, so be it.
When the going gets tough the women go shopping. Only joking.
Bravo but then why are so many people defending trans. As you said, men are men and women are women, NO ONE can pretend otherwise. Yet they do.
Good reply. I don’t know why you are being downvoted. You are the type of woman that can be part of the solution.
I think it’s men doing the downvoting Tony, those with huge chips on their shoulders and a lot less self confidence than yourself.
So many downvotes Katharine, obviously an awful lot of ‘men’ with fragile egos on this site.
Kathleen Stock?
Not sure you can blame women for this. The culture of making safety and comfort the supreme goal ahead of adventure and achievement creates a generation unable to deal with the slings and arrows. Just as infants need to be exposed to dirt and infection for their immune system to develop properly, children and teenagers need to be exposed to caibrated risk, freedom and responsibility. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff pointed out that Generation Z arrived at university never having gone on a date, done a Saturday job, been on holiday with friends or experienced many of the normal teenage rites of passage. The result – they were unable to cope with student life, and an epidemic of mental health problems ensued. Worse – they demand trigger warnings, safe spaces and freedom from “microaggressions.” This article expertly lays out what has happened to the institutions..
Agreed. My wife works in recruitment and admissions. She noticed about 10 years ago now young people at open days with Mum & Dad in close attention, often the only ones asking questions. There’s an epidemic of young men hurting themselves when they go on their first overseas trip alone.
Never having been allowed to climb they cannot do risk assessment. Drink is taken and bravado takes over. Also their friends do not restrain them also not understanding the risks.
Some kids have NEVER been outside the home without a parent or carer in attendance. Aged 5 I was going into the town centre with my pal to spend our pocket money. Now any parent allowing their 5yo out alone will get referred to Social Services.
Not to mention children now being tethered to hovering parents through their phones, 24-7.
Well there are a lot of perverts around now so life can be a lot more dangerous. I roamed free as a boy but you cannot do that now.
Rubbish! To both sentences!
What data do you use for your assertion about more risk today? I believe free roaming children are at less risk in Britain today than in any previous period. Compared to Dickensian times? Compared to Hogarthian Britain?
On your second point, my observation over many years is that children arrive in this world much the same physically and psychically as they always did. What has decreased markedly over my lifetime is the freedom each new generation of parents has allowed their children and the level of supervision their children receive has correspondingly increased.
Try telling the parents of the children who were groomed in the Uk by Muslim gangs, raped and physically abused, that came about because of increased immigration, you haven’t a clue. THAT is why children aren’t safe to go out alone anymore, there are infinitely more despicable perverted animals around now than in previous years.
You had 2 downvotes Tony, strange, who on earth would downvote you for saying there are perverts around? Touching nerves I wonder.
Relatedly, it occurred to me some time ago that Guardian whining about women online getting more abuse than men is probably false. Take Reddit. When I realise I am talking to a woman, I tone it down. (You should see my arguments with men – well maybe you shouldn’t). I think that well over 90% of men react the same way. Just observe the behaviour of a group of rowdy men when a woman enters the company. They nearly always quieten down a bit. It’s been that way since time immemorial. There are good reasons for it. Women are more sensitive, duh. It’s not that they get more harassment, it’s that they feel it more.
Female here, and I agree.
Frankly, I’d never even considered this, but I think you’re on to something. The confrontation that inevitably accompanies the clash of ideas is something that, for centuries, male-dominated universities were perfectly okay with. It stands to reason that the influx of women onto campuses–as students and, increasingly, as professors–would be accompanied by a push to make those campuses more congenial environments for women. There’s also the not insignificant detail that men themselves would respond to this push by attempting to accommodate the new demands, including modifying much of their own behaviour.
This isn’t to suggest women don’t belong at university, or are uninterested in ideas. There are as many brilliant women as men, and societies that fail to educate their women are eventually going to fall further and further behind those that do. But it would be unrealistic to expect the environment in which that education takes place to remain entirely unaltered.
What is your evidence that there are as many brilliant women as men? Larry Summers famously pointed out one of the reasons for doubt about this.
An alternative argument about the value of educating women is that it is the best predictor of low birth rates. A society whose women do not reproduce fails at the most fundamental level: it becomes extinct.
Has your cave got electricity yet?
Kathleen Stock in a recent essay illustrated how this malignant ideology uses hooks in both sexes to maintain and propagate itself. For women the ‘Are you kind?’ hook is used to corral them into compliance. If this does not work then threats of violence are used.
Men also have hooks which malignant ideologies can use, the promise of ultimate power, the flattery of the intellect and idea that pure reason can be used to ‘rationally’ organise society and that one is a member of a group of far seers who will do this.
Communism, Fascism, male dominated malignant ideologies with histories to prove it. (NB “purity” is not a girl thing)
It is therefore a matter of being aware of ones weaknesses and overcoming them.
The helicopter mums have taken over. It used to be cotton wool kids not being able to play outside in case they get hurt, now they are protecting everyone from hurtful thoughts. Women’s empowerment has neutered the West.
Good point. Maybe it would be more accurate to refer to “people with feminine characters” instead of “women”. My experience is that a lot of young men think and act in a feminine way, while a considerable part of young women seems to have more b*lls than male colleagues. The problem is that a growing share of each generation lacks male role models, as fathers are often missing (single mother, divorce, absent father due to workoholism, etc.) and there are no more traditional communities that could fill those gaps.
Frankly, I’d never even considered this, but I think you’re on to something. The confrontation that inevitably accompanies the clash of ideas is something that, for centuries, male-dominated universities were perfectly okay with. It stands to reason that the influx of women onto campuses–as students and, increasingly, as professors–would be accompanied by a push to make those campuses more congenial environments for women. There’s also the not insignificant detail that men themselves would respond to this push by attempting to accommodate the new demands, including modifying many of their own behaviours.
This isn’t to suggest women don’t belong at university or are uninterested in ideas. There are as many brilliant women as men, and societies that fail to educate their women are eventually going to fall further and further behind those that do. But it would be unrealistic to expect the environment in which that education takes place to remain unaltered.
It will be an interesting social experiment as many institutions feminize and become explicitly woke. What will happen is that the most dynamic young men (and to a lesser extent young women) will avoid them completely as there is no future for them there. They will probably be more likely to start their own businesses or be independent consultants. This will obviously weaken these institutions so what you will have left is that only the public funded ones will survive. You are already seeing some private corporations explicitly eject their woke employees as they recognize them as a drain on effectiveness. Men who aren’t dynamic will likely fail in even greater numbers – and likely cause a huge number of headaches for society. It will be interesting to watch in a grim sort of way.
“women don’t believe in the open outcry of the male Culture of Insult and the confrontation of ideas in the public square.”
Um, I do! How is this different from “all men are toxic”? I DO confront others. What is the “culture of women” and as a women when did I miss out on membership? Also have you seen the soy boyz in the Uni Admin? Please lets not swing from one extreme to another. Just get the crazies out of the administration.
Women have been attending colleges for decades and they have always been as you describe. The problem with these last two generations is that MEN are not MEN anymore. GenY soy boyz are not providing any balance to the female force let alone positive role models or leadership. The male force has been extinguished.
Add to this, TOO MANY people went to College, which used to be difficult to get into and therefore only available to the disciplined and the motivated ie well aligned with the MALE force.
Who decided to put a generation into lifelong debt with unlimited funds available for ever lowering standards of applicants to hide from a collapsing economy by studying useless subjects? Did the feminists do this?
No, the BANKERS did this! and turned two generations of females of both sexes into useless crybabies.
Well said.
You might enjoy Ann Douglas’s 1977 book entitled “The Feminization of American Culture.”
What sort of women are you talking about? Biological or non biological?
Men in dresses in other words.
I think it’s more of a generational issue than a ‘men vs women’ thing. I’m what they call a millennial, and even among my peers (who are well past university age) I see the traits you’ve identified in equal measure in men and women. Very few young men who are students or graduates embody that ‘culture of insult’ or take part in discussions on the public square. Or, perhaps more pertinently, the public square is now twitter – where there are no respectful and nuanced discussions, where ideological divisions become deeper and more entrenched, and where the risk of a real-world confrontation can be entirely avoided. I agree that traditionally masculine values have declined to the point that they are almost taboo, but I don’t think it follows that women are to blame.
If ‘feminism’ were the cause then we would have seen these problems manifesting far earlier in universities, which were at the forefront of the sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s. In reality this is a very recent phenomenon, appearing almost fully-formed in the last 10-15 years.
Bulls**t. I am a woman and would defend myself and anyone else against wrongdoing. Safe spaces for women, definitely yes, why should we be be in a toilet with a man/woman taking a pi*s ; tackle out Infront of us. The same man, let’s face it, man who could try to assault/rape a woman in said toilet because of superior strength. As for supporting the pathetic university “students”, no way they are brainwashed imbeciles whose only goal is to make a difference, a mark on life, even if it turns to be a smear of sh*t. A skid mark.
I agree with every word in this article. It is a fine article that, in my opinion, accurately diagnoses the problem in so many Western universities. But it’s one of many that focus on the problem without offering solutions. Diagnosing the problem is a necessary start to finding a solution, but by now there’s a huge literature out there describing the unravelling of higher education. I’m not sure we need more diagnosis.
Perhaps Unherd will commission Prof. Goodwin to write an essay on how to reclaim our universities, or perhaps the sad reality is we’re past the point of no return.
My own sense is we’ve expanded the university sector too far and raised expectations too high. Most of these students, especially in the humanities, lack the skills to find a well paid job after graduation, unless it’s in the grievance industry or its surrogate, HR. As the author suggests, many young people would be better served with an apprenticeship leading to a commercially useful skill.
Automation is coming for the university graduates, which will of course bring with it a whole host of problems, but the notion that ‘we must all become better paid knowledge workers’ is dying as we speak. Industry has already discovered that there are a good many university graduates whom your business would be better off not having, just because they _are_ university graduates. These two factors should cause a serious decline in the number of students who want to go to university in the first place, because they only went there ‘in order to get ahead’. It is going to take a while — possibly a generation — before the universities can empty themselves of the professors who never wanted to be scholars, only activists, but a market correction is coming for them, too.
There is not a lot one can do ‘top down’ to fix such things, but one thing springs to mind. The USA is full of plans to bail out the students from defauting on their student loans, by giving the students money. This is the wrong approach. You really want to stick it to the universities and make sure they have to take the hit, instead of the taxpayers. Having a good number of once prestigious universities have to declare bankruptcy because their graduates cannot find work will send a message that even the self-absorbed young cannot ignore.
I agree with everything you say and would add that those who go ‘in order to get ahead’ are facing serious competition from those who are sold on the subsidised ‘rite of passage’/social life/ themes, who join the ‘movement of the moment’ and emerge with little in real skills, knowledge and aptitude to offer an employer.
I believe your point about self-correcting market forces may well be correct, eventually. In the shorter term, I am more concerned about the impact of this young population of neo-Jacobins on the body politic. The levels of intolerance, self-justification and claimed victimhood engendered on today’s campuses do not bode well for the wider social fabric, and seem to be worse here in the USA.
The only oases are STEM departments. Even these are under attack now, and the resulting Lysenkoism will surely accelerate the decline of the West.
At my son’s graduation from Leicester the VC stood up and said “… make no mistake, this (university) is a business.” And we had all mistaken it for a place of learning. OK, if they’re businesses let them stand or fall on that basis. They’ve been trading on their reputations, built up over centuries, attracting paying foreign students on the basis that they were once good places for advanced study. Market forces, or reality as I prefer to call it, will eventually tear them down. This might be painful but it seems we will have to have a catastrophe rather than an enlightened correction.
I’m all for more apprenticeships. Do you have any solutions?
Make the universities own their own loan books. If one of their graduates doesn’t earn enough to repay the loan, the uni loses equivalent funding. Currently the poor old taxpayer picks up the bill. The universities must feel the pain.
Pretty quickly universities would stop pushing half-baked humanities courses to intellectually middling students because each one that ends up earning less than £50k p.a. will be a loss to them.
Have you seen academic salaries? For a start many lecturing jobs have been or are being casualised. Tenure is pretty much gone now. There is no job security.
As a scientist your job is to bring in as much research funding as you can. Whether you offer value for money from that funding is immaterial to the bean counters.
Surely low academic salaries and job security are not a reason to offer low value degrees to kids who would be better off learning a trade or starting work. Banging out thousands of psychology graduates every year is a waste of everyone’s time. It really is a scam.
Exactly. Privatise the universities.
Freddie’s interview with Jesse Powell is worth a listen. These people have become so disruptive in the work place that some employer pushback is starting.
I’m not sure there is a solution.There is something in the “weak men create bad times” etc trope. Unfortunately we will have to endure the bad times created by weak men before things get better.
My advice to my grandchildren is learn a trade. Bots can’t fix the plumbing and most intellectuals can’t fix a decent cup of tea.
In the year 1522 there were hundreds (over 800 in fact) monastic houses (monasteries, abbeys, friaries, etc.) in England and Wales. These institutions and their members formed an integral part of the fabric of society. In 1540 all were abolished.
In the year 2022 there were hundreds of universities. These institutions and their members form an integral part of the fabric of contemporary society. In 2040…
Good point – we can’t see the future. Who thought when they saw their first IPhone that it was going to destroy our society. Most progressive institutions are propped up with public funding – I don’t think they appreciate how at risk they really are. If De Santis becomes President of the US we might get an illustration of this.
I retired in 2016 (thankfully!) from a full-time lectureship at a UK university and agree with Goodwin’s analysis in every respect. As someone has observed below, he could perhaps have acknowledged the influence of female/feminist predominance in the way in which universities have evolved over the past decade.
You rightly point to the lack of a suggested solution. However, this is not a problem confined to the university sector; it is a terrible evil that has throttled western society generally since the emergence of an intolerant Woking Class elite. I suggest that the solution lies not with the universities themselves, but with our political leadership. Until we have leaders who have the courage to challenge this monstrous new worldview and who can prevail, most individuals understandably will not dare to put their heads above the parapet to face possible cancellation from livelihoods, social vilification and banishment from ordinary life. When governments, like that of Trudeau in Canada, can freeze individuals’ bank modest bank accounts merely because they donated piffling sums to a cause with which that government did not agree, that should tell us in no uncertain terms that the problem is far wider and deeper – and far more frightening for our longer term futures.
It may take successive generations to realise the evil that has befallen upon our ‘free’ world before a counter-revolution restores some semblance of sanity and commits to genuine freedoms. Just consider how long it took from the Russian Revolution of 1917 for successive generations to realise the evils of the USSR system of oppression and revert to a freer model of political and social governance! And in the meantime, Stalin murdered the greatest number of human beings by any leader in history over the period his horrific reign, not counting all those whom Lenin disposed of without batting an eyelid before him.
I agree, a good article and I agree, the university sector needs radical change.
I do wish Goodwin, and everyone else, would stop using the word liberal to describe those whose intolerance makes them anything but.
You can dress it up in intellectual language all you like but as attending university is a privilege given only to a small percentage of the global population who just happen to have been born in the already over privileged western developed world this extremely over privileged, in global terms, minority, have now decided that this global minority status has granted them the right to indulge in extreme self-pity.
Thus, we now have the world’s most over privileged group indulging in the world’s most extreme example of self-pity.
Personally, I would describe this as pathetic, that would, no doubt, lead to calls for me to be cancelled. But as there is nowhere for me to be cancelled from – who cares?
The other part of the problem is that this privileged group of college educated “intellectuals” in the West are too big a part of the population.
College should be for the elite – not by birth but by ability and aptitude. Instead it has become a full paid for several years long party for the mediocre, who then preen themselves as being superior to “uneducated” truck drivers, nurses, plumbers and the like.
Speaking as someone who was a student from 1971 to 1974 and became one again from 2019 I would say you are somewhat mistaken. My undergraduate colleagues now work much harder than earlier and, unlike my 1970s generation have far less certainty that a degree is a meal ticket for life
After seemingly laying the blame on the students, you eventually nail the problem in this paragraph.
“Conservatives are as much to blame as the Left. By focusing relentlessly on the marketisation of universities, by talking about students as consumers, we have created a climate in which the demands of students, not academics, increasingly shape our intellectual culture.”
This is the root problem that the political right refuses to recognize. Once you turn the students into paying customers, then the universities have to compete to keep them “happy”, and are running scared of “brand damage” caused by student accusations of racism, transphobia etc. It’s immaterial whether there’s any basis for the accusations – in the current culture of “no smoke without fire” the damage has been done.
Throw in the fact that universities are staffed overwhelmingly by flaky white liberals who cave at the slightest sign of trouble, and you have the hot mess we see today.
It’s not the students’ fault that the adults who are supposed to be in charge refuse to act like adults. The only criterion for getting into uni should be academic – not financial. Abolish tuition fees in state universities, but tighten up on the academic requirements for getting in and for staying in – fail three papers and you’re out.
“Once you turn the students into paying customers, then the universities have to compete to keep them “happy”, and are running scared of “brand damage” …”
Though nothing damages your brand so much as losing your reputation for the fearless pursuit of academic rigour. Perhaps the problem will correct itself over time.
Abolish tuition fees for useful degrees and triple them for the bullsh1t ones.
Maybe, depends on your definitions. I don’t think ‘useful’ should just mean vocational, professional and technical subjects – that’s a very utilitarian outlook. Having a certain number of people (you could call them an elite) trained in the liberal arts is also useful i.e. conducive to the common good. Real bullsh1t subjects like psychology and media studies should indeed attract triple fees or more.
Media, gender studies etc were the ones I refer to.
Actually, that’s an interesting idea.
Many nations make it easier to legally immigrate for those with skills currently prioritized by the receiving government, with that set of skills changing over time.
Likewise, government support for a university education could be prioritized for critically needed fields in which there is a current or anticipated shortage.
Or course, for this to work, the prioritized list would need to be curated by a relatively non-political organization with clear mandate and measures. We don’t need an incoming party deciding that we need a lot more gender studies majors and fewer engineers.
During the initial covid outbreak, when the nhs was clamouring for nurses, the government offered a bursary when it should have reverted nursing training back to an apprenticeship, imo. There are times that government make decisions that makes you wonder what planet they’re on! (Tbf I thought that about every decision made in covid!)
Australia tried that – to much high dudgeon. Now the new government looks like reversing the policy. D’ohhh!
Students have no real power, the blame lies squarely with the university authorities for pandering to their whims.
My hope is that when the current leadership retires, the new leaders at these institutions – who came of age in the 90s (the age of Tarantino and Irving Welsh and, er, Viz) – will have no truck with these snowflakes and stamp it out.
I agree completely with your first point. The idea that universities are helpless when confronted by the demands of children is ludicrous. A university that cannot even defend the pursuit of open academic inquiry should disband itself, as it serves no useful function. That even the admirable Professor Goodwin cannot bring himself to say as much, speaks volumes.
The “ladies” who frequently lead the post modern, critical social Justice ideology in universities do not seem to see much wrong with the state of affairs. Indeed they are winning the culture war and seeing the fruits of their labor in their students. They believe in blank slatist, socially constructed gender (biology is irrelevant) and thus puberty blockers for tom boys. They believe that the west is essentially evil and its institutions need to be decolonized, overthrown, and replaced with their utopian world view of intersectional “equity.” In the US they drive victimhood through race – the UK is easier shamed by their original sin of colonialism. That young girls are harmed by the thousands, defunding the police and decriminalizing bad behavior is driving homicide rates to historic highs in the US doesn’t bother them as they are utterly convinced of their rightness. The irony is they simultaneously claim all knowledge is subjective and their is no objective truth – except theirs of course.
For the record they are not ladies, they are akin to Stalin’s useful idiots set on utopian revolution. As for the “gentleman” professors who stood by and let this happen, society is paying for your cowardice and may not survive it.
Those on the Right should learn from the Left’s use of language.
The author points to those with views that go against the grain being ‘ostracised’, etc. Isn’t this sort of behaviour what used to be simply called ‘bullying’.
Perhaps (accurately) branding the pushback against this trend as ‘tackling bullying’ and using methods appropriate to that, would be more effective than describing it in terms of ‘free speech ‘, ‘anti-woke’, etc?
You are correct, I think, in pointing out that language matters, it makes it difficult to argue against someone who calls themselves , for example ‘progressive’, or ‘on the right side of history’, very few people want to be ‘regressive’, and who wants to be on the wrong side of history? This is not new, of course, when one group calls itself ‘pro-life’ where does it leave its opponants – as ‘anti-life’? So, it’s important to carefully pick your terms, making sure that the opposite term sounds horrible, and your anti-bullying framing is a good start.
How about “tackling woke bullying”?
“And in the finding that 61% of students now think that main job of the university is to ensure that all students are protected from discrimination rather than allow unlimited free speech, up from only 37% in 2016″.
Where was this finding, who did the survey? Wherever it came from, it would correlate with a similar finding I read not long ago (where? Sorry – I have forgotten…) that, when asked what their main priority was in debating a certain issue, the majority of students who took part in said survey rated “searching for potential discrimination” higher than “finding truth”.
In other words, in their minds, the search for victimhood trumps the search for truth.
The central belief of postmodern, Critical Theory is that there is no such thing as “Truth”, or “reality”, or “facts”, only power and “language games”, i.e. that language can do anything, it is just a tool to create reality and assert power, and so must be used for good, i.e. create “social justice” by “centering” the currently “marginalised”, etc.
This philosophical school has gradually, over several decades, crept from philosophy to literature to the Arts to the softer social sciences and law, and now to the sciences and medicine.
Because graduate students and faculty are self-selecting, this becomes a vicious circle, imo.
Those students who are motivated by the desire to be activists more than by traditional motives of “search for the objective truth” are more motivated to go into academia the more it teaches this view, while those who are motivated by the old-fashioned view are repelled by it and leave.
Ironically, this particular philosophical view is being taught as “the Truth”, not as just another viewpoint which has its critics and should be critically assessed.
True, O so True!
One small fact that seems to have been ignored (or maybe I just missed it in the verbiage) is the fact lots and lots of people have been encouraged to go to university and study junk (as in the sense of junk bonds) degrees who are not up to the task.
When I were a lad people went to university because 1) they were bright and 2) they wanted to learn. These days its just delaying working by four years – three supposedly studying and a gap year.
When I went to university as an undergraduate, in the 70s, some people were motivated by genuine intellectual curiosity, but they were the minority. Some of those went on to grad school and academia.
Most were there to get a piece of paper that would get them a good job. Some chose a practical degree and that worked, others were under the misapprehension that an Arts and Sciences undergrad would suffice, and struggled afterwards, or came back for a practical graduate degree.
An important contingent were would-be activists there to get a degree that would allow them to “change the world” in accordance with their pre-existing desires, and went into the humanities, arts or soft social sciences, the “victim studies” which were just getting started, etc.
The latter are the ones now in control of our social institutions.
They went about creating the “need” for a host of jobs requiring that kind of degree, and started a self-perpetuating mechanism.
And meanwhile, while we have problematised everything – gender, race, nation, history – and have turned in on ourselves, focusing on what divides us – countries where such things are not tolerated or are denounced as decadent (China, Russia) are happy to expand their empires.
“Emotional safety” is impossible if the generation doesn’t have the rational tools to deal with its emotions. Zoomers have thereby condemned themselves to a lifetime of arrested development.
If I was hiring now, I would deliberately exclude graduates. They don’t know how to do anything except disrupt.
Great article. However, laying the blame simply with the students, while very tempting, is to detract somewhat from what the author touches on and what I consider the key underlying factor: that of the increasingly stark monoculture.
Only in this hideously lopsided political environment would it be possible to standardise the creeping teaching of increasingly unhinged modes of thought – inescapable to any young person finding themselves inside any university; An environment completely free from pushback, able to exploit in young people a burgeoning obsession with notions of harm, identity, leftist authoritarianism, and gradual but steady rejection of tradional western values and norms – the fruits of this then to trickle down to broader society, only for the cycle to begin again with less resistance and more pliable cohorts.
As the article righly points out, Conservatives should certainly shoulder some of the blame, but then so should centrists and the moderate left, who though stupidity, cowardice, laziness, or simply shortsighted aversion to warnings voiced by their political opponents, have alllowed a principle – maybe *the* principle – foundational pillar of our society to be captured by a movement only capable of looking at the world in a particular way, and with the knowledge that when societies go down this road the result is always calamity.
HR is a big part of this problem. It allows nondescript people to unduly influence the ethos and set the standards of excellence at whatever institution they inveigle their way into. Engulfed in bureaucracy many academics can’t be bothered fighting this well oiled machine.
If the organisation’s ethos is to make as much money as possible (one needs to ensure ‘at least’ £half million salary + expenses for a ‘Govnor’ ) then I doubt HR alone is the driver in providing such an environment. There are countless echo chambers on social media that influence prospective students and, in turn, drive student need. With exceptions, the ‘money machines’ called universities will want to respond to that need and HR will recruit to its brief – or face it’s own music!
Money is at the heart of this but unfortunately HR is deemed indispensable. Working in conjunction with consultancies a future of enticing business growth is presented to the university which involves pandering to the student demographic to bolster recruits. Locked in a race to the bottom, once fearless centres for excellence become ’safe spaces’ etc. And once installed, HR departments become the working engines of this degeneration.
”What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”
It’s really not so difficult to solve the problem of a ‘developing’ monoculture at universities, and the best thing is, it can use the very tools created by the liberal left in the first place.
it’s in everyone’s interest, unless, obviously, you’re a face-ist (have to beat the censors algorithm) that diversity is a good thing (see what I mean about weaponising their own tools against them). So, if the fact that their is an eight to one bias, in favour of left liberal, faculty employees is correct, then in order to restore balance, a diversity quota should be introduced, only employing conservative leaning lecturers, until ‘balance’, or something approaching ‘balance’ has taken place. I appreciate that this might be more difficult in some fields than in others, but new candidates will soon get the message. If you want a job, in a highly competitive field, even if you maybe aren’t the strongest candidate, being a minority (of opinion) will boost your chances of success considerably.
You see, that wasn’t so difficult to solve now, was it ? And I didn’t even need to go to university to come up with such a simple, solution.
You are making a definitional error – diversity does not mean diversity in all areas, only in those which are currently the favoured groups. Opinions not in accord with current ‘fashionable’ thinking do not come under the umbrella of diversity, so, holders of these opinions are not a protected group. It tends to be forgotten that aprotected group can easily be pushed outside the umbrella for any particular failing – be white-adjacent is a grave moral failing for a number of groups.
Robert Frost: ‘Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence’.
I’ve just mentioned this article to my daughter. She’s just finished her first year at Uni and she’s 20 in a couple of days’ time. That makes her Generation-Z for sure. Rather encouragingly, she and her pals all think that the victim/woke/cancel generation are older than her cohort. Her mates all think this other generation are just “pathetic”.
It’s difficult to know where this dangerous, totally illiberal pestilence is coming from, but I hope it will pass.
Thankyou for that, a much-needed counter to the “we’re doomed” atmosphere that’s trending on Unherd today.
If nature abhors a vacuum, what the prevailing orthodoxies are creating in academia and wider institutions might be seen as akin to a vacuum, certainly vacuous!
The vacuum itself is the product of a collision between two “purity spirals”: a consumerist ideology that mistakes itself for objectivity (“the reality is, we’re a business”) and an emotivist ideology that asserts imperialistic subjectivity (“feelings are facts” and the ills of verbal “violence” warrant physical coercion). One hopes that we’re at the nadir of this movement; but there’s no guarantee that what fills the vacuum will be better than what came before.
I wouldn’t hold your breath! Would require a signIficant cull of ‘activist’ tutors intent on socio-political indoctrination and many universities to undergo a radical realignment of their recruitment spec. Unfortunately, for impressionable students, the system has long been corrupted and the current ‘show us your money (sorry, the taxpayers’ money) and you’re in – is all that matters!
I have seen a few arguments that the new generation is very much anti-woke, can’t remember where though…
Do today’s students have any interest in having their minds challenged & stretched by learning from people who are older, wiser, more experienced & more rounded, or would they prefer to leave university as ignorant & blinkered as when they entered it? After all, achieving nothing of any value doesn’t come cheap these days.
PS I see my name seems to have picked up a typo lodged in the records from some way back. (It’s “Curtis”, not “Curits”.) Can anybody advise me how to put this right? As a seventy-two-year-old graduate, I’m always willing to learn!
Mail support @ unherd.com (without the spaces) and explain the problem.
Yes, they do. The idea that students are ideologically blinkered has absolutely no basis in fact.
Assuming you’re the drama teacher you probably don’t see it because a quick look at twitter shows you’re as ideologically blinkered as the students.
No basis in fact. OK. Could you give us some examples of accepted political viewpoint diversity among your students?
Parents are lucky if the child bothers to marry these days & even more fortunate if they marry someone of the opposite gender as assigned at birth. Wouldn’t worry about their stance on Brexit too much myself
Thanks for a great article, especially the strong supporting stats. I’m reminded that for decades, Boomers (mostly progressives but even some conservatives) were complaining that millennials and Gen Xers were no longer activists like they were as students. Well, they’ve got what they wanted now.
All credit to the Torys on apprenticeships. During the pandemic they gave 4k incentives for taking them on, plus paid 95% of training costs. So firms could pay about 16k/year to take on new hires who in some cases were more productive than Grad trainees who cost ~10k more. (At least at my firm, recent apprenticeships have on average been turning out better than new graduates). Much of the pandemic support is now gone, but I understand the government still pays most of the training, so apprenticeships remain quite good value.
As always, follow the money. You started out asking the question, “When will we do something about it?” Answer: when you stop paying for it. You get more of what you pay for. The “culture of victimhood” is very profitable when the victims gain control over institutions that control the public purse strings, don’t you think? Why do you think they have crept into virtually every type of institution that takes public money? Think.
Excellent essay which summarises my growing concerns in recent times (observed as a retired graduate recruiter)
Who’s in charge of ‘safe spaces?’ Who will protect us from the ‘protectors?’ More than ever we’re living in Kafka’s world, both in terms of its bureaucratic surveillance, and in the illogic of what passes for its reasoning. Wittgenstein somewhere asks what you can do when someone counts, ’98, 99, 100… 102, 104,106…’ and says he’s ‘continuing the system.’ You’d think it would be an easy matter of showing him, via a demo of mathematical inconsistency (“How can we distinguish, in your ‘system,’ between 99+2 and 99+3?”), that he isn’t continuing the system; but it turns out reductio ad absurdum arguments don’t work on people who are willing to accept absurdity.
The ideal, in a free speech environment, is to compare the merits of competing ideas and allow merit alone to determine the winner: that’s the theory. But what do you do when idea A has clearly, by any fair measure, won the merit battle, yet the majority of people embraces losing idea B anyway? Schopenhauer warned that you have to be aware when you’re no longer dealing with people’s reason but their will: they simply will not understand you and become impervious to further argument. It’s not the business of reason to persuade the unreasonable, and free speech avails nothing against a determination not to receive messages. The reasonable have been relegated to the outskirts of Kafka’s Castle now, and there’s no obvious way for them to get any response from inside.
You missed one of the key causes; Universities are now full of thick kids doing dope “degrees” being egged on by mediocre academics.
As an aside about feminism/femininity may I mention the following. From the early seventies onwards there was pressure to make examinations ‘girl-friendly.’ A Chemistry colleague was advised that there should be fewer austere calculations about valency, more essay questions about environmentalism. <Girls are better at writing essays.> Similar trends occurred across a swathe of subjects. This was but one manner in which the academic landscape was altered.
Interesting.
I saw the reverse happen in the softer social sciences, as long reading lists, research papers, and long exams with essay questions were scrapped in favour of of much shorter readings, multiple-choice or short answers on exams, and take-home essays.
And lots of group work.
Clever women are just that. Clever. Don’t tell me a woman who falls for this woke liberal claptrap is clever. Emma Thompson, ex Cambridge, flies in first class to protest Green issues; to support ‘wimmin’ who superglue themselves to things. If she or they are clever I give up.
I wonder if it is the same in the arts and in more technical (or should I say “serious”…) disciplines like engineering or medicine.
Is this primarily an Anglo thing? It looks like Germany is the same as ever to me. Fairly rigorous courses, judging by my nephews.
Yes, so far, it is primarily an Anglo thing, but also Scandinavian and increasingly, French.
Being offended is subjective. For example a book is not in itself offensive. It only becomes ”offensive” when someone subjectively deems it to be offensive,
I can be offended by what you say to me but what specifically justifies me taking offence sbout what you say to someone else when what you say does not relate to who I am myself, even if it may be a bit horrid?
Education isn’t about burying the truth because it is hard for ‘you’ to face, which is intellectual cowardice. It is about journeying into the future, through discovery not hiding in the hope that reality will go away. Parents and teachers are there to guide the young, not be bullied into silence by them (look at the stay at home generation, which doesn’t want independence and the kids attacking and killing their parents or in America taking automatic weapons to school and killing anyone that they can get their hands on). We need a generation that can think and act for themselves but we haven’t got one anymore. On top of this think how censorship kills exploration and thought. This is not regeneration of society but degeneration. Intelligence is going down the pan and as history tells us, those who can’t use their tongues and their minds, end up using their fists and violence (‘Speak hands for me!’ Julius Caesar).
Would be interesting to know what % of the ‘totalitarian’ students are females ?Decades ago that feminist icon Germaine Greer said that left wing feminist females tended to form mobs that were intolerant of any contrarian opinions
The humanities and social sciences are now overwhelmingly female, as are the “victim studies”, so most of them would be.
Males have pretty deserted those disciplines, being now found mostly in business and economics and Science and engineering (but are mostly Asian now.)
In another article today, it notes that Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Tom Cruise dominate media 40 years on from the 1980s. A corollary of the problems of freedom of speech and enquiry in the academy may now be witnessed in an ossified culture where content and ideas from the last generation still dominate the market.
When an engineering design fails it’s brief in extremis the term “rip up and re-try” is used. That may be the only way out for UK/US/ANZAC “universities”. Putting fees up to 100k PA and restricting entry to persons with iBACC scores of 40+ or equivalent may also work. This would be sad for STEM students who go to Uni for genuine reasons but what else can be done? Perhaps now we see the long march of the frankfurt school has had so much help from governments and tax payer funded “companies” ie banks and tech monopolies we simply need to stop funding Social Science and Humanities degrees? Some people below identify the problem as a woman thing but i think if it has a social character its more likely to be low IQ than gender.
Thanks for this, terrifying though it is.
We are so lucky that the collapse of the higher education system on both sides of the Atlantic into Stalinist totalitarianism coincides with the increasing ability to communicate clearly over the internet. Ambitious professors should offer classes online. Jordan Peterson has made a fortune pioneering this approach, and has abandoned university life, dismissing his former colleagues with justified contempt.
We’ve come a long way from J H Newman’s idea of a liberal education:
“Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form,—for the mind is like the body.”
The only solution I can think of is a new model for degree courses, primarily online but with provision for tutorial gatherings at small hired venues (such as a pub room). This should cost the student a great deal less than the current racket. (I realise this remedy only really applies to arts degrees, and that STEM subjects need their own infrastructure etc.)
The current obsession of the New Right with University culture is the rage of Caliban looking at some one else’s face in the mirror when they ask “Who is the rightest of them all”. Having been a University student in the upsurge of unrest in the late sixties and early 70s, I am well aware that many of that “radicalised” generation are the backbone of the Conservative vote today. The world of the future will be dominated by climate change, wars, mass migrations and resistance to mass migrations from the “haves” of the “West”. The graduates of today will end up being more influenced by the self-interested necessities of tomorrow than the values of student life today. The same thing, of course, is likely to happen to Liberals and advocates of human rights. So don’t be so alarmist. You will win in the end – if you survive that long.
This discussion has for some reason traverses into the feminism/mascularism sphere and became rather tetchy.
Male or female we seem to have lost touch with who the adults are (should be) in universities.
What has happened to the supposed backbone of those in charge?
Why are students not simply thrown out if they do not conform to the rules?
What happens if students have a ‘satisfactory’ three years in university yet fail their exams.
For the last two points: all of this affects the bottom line in terms of coining in income from tuition fees and accommodation. Failed students, or those who don’t get the marks they want, may well then mark the institution down in ‘satisfaction’ surveys. The latter impacts on ranking scores, which in turn affect income both from future students and research grants.
In other words, higher education is following the same arc as public education, dumbing itself down to accommodate the lowest common denominator students in terms of intelligence, effort, mental resiliency, etc. At some point, society decided that everyone, or at least most people need to be college educated. After that it was only a matter of time, because an education system designed to be challenging to the top 25% smartest and most talented individuals will be much harder for the next 25% and nigh impossible for the rest. Just wait, next there will be a demand for public accountability and the government will get involved and create elected officials or boards like we already have for public schools, and then we’ll have watered down, ‘whatever we can teach without having to deal with angry parents at next Tuesday’s PTA meeting’, college education to go with our elementary and secondary education.
It seems to me that universities are now dominated by administrators who see the purpose of the university as quite different from what it was formerly. They see it as instructing and enforcing currently fashionable moral views. What is more, I doubt that they think the enforcement of these moral views would be advanced by debate or the toleration of dissident opinion. The university from which I retired is currently engaged in a loudly trumpeted “culture shift” (their words). The maintenance of correct opinion seems to be as important to the administration as the maintenance of academic standards. That’s the impression I am given from reading their various notices, many of which start with statements about the administration’s current moral preoccupations.
Furthermore, administrators wish to protect their positions (and thus livelihoods) and, with the extortionate cost of university tuition, at least here in the States, that means truckling to the students. These students are the product of years of state-sponsored moral instruction based on the ideas that victimhood confers nobility, and that offense of any sort or degree to themselves or others is intolerable. The results of pushing fashionable opinion and truckling to students who have uncritically accepted their earlier (fashionable moral) instruction is what we see.
The bureaucratic inertia of institutions as large as universities seems enough prevent any meaningful change, but rising university costs, the easy availability of instruction online, and the dismay of those students and their parents who have not bought into the ideas of university administrators may result in lower enrollments, at least of competent students, and perhaps the erosion of faith in university degrees. Such an erosion might actually be a good thing in the long run, at least regarding areas that are not purely technical.
It should be easy to filter out the ideological fanatics, snowflakes and crybullies at the gates of academe. Just apply a few common sense tests next to scholastic aptitude tests. Sure, the universities will lose quite a lot of customers, but (a) these folks had no scholarly interests anyhow, being mere activists (academic proletariat) and (b) the universities have grown too big anyhow. After some years, the priestly class of left wing lecturers and professors will go away too out of frustration with the new cohorts of academically interested students.
Let me pose an idea that elaborates on the culture of victimization: The ultimate Revenge of the Nerds!
Basically, the proponents of victim culture have always been there. But now they dominate the administrations of the universities and of … well… everything, it seems. They’re now free to engage all of their efforts in trying to regulate society’s path to their Utopia. They believe centralized management can achieve anything, when, if fact the centralization of everything yields sclerosis.
First you want to blame women, now it’s the nerds. “They”, as someone earlier pointed out, is a broad generalization that fails every time. Plenty of nerds recognize objectivity, in fact are drawn to it, for the very opposite reason of the argument you make – because in objectivity meritocracy rises to the top. While it is also true, some nerds suffer from the human condition (as do many others) of seeking control over others through power & money.
The Broadway production of Hadestown filled me with hope for our culture. Orpheus is a dog whistle for left activists while Hades personifies toxic masculinity. But then Hades’ heart is revealed as similar to Orpheus’. It is Orpheus’ turn to draw on his goodness and hope to help his lover. Overcome with doubt, resentment and faithlessness – he fails. The prologue returns to the mystery of wisdom of culture and the gods.
It’s my daughters’ favorite musical and the favorite of the women I met at the theater. We all have darkness in our nature but also faith and love that long to refine it. That path may be different for women than men and the troubles in the university may serve a societal purpose we don’t perceive.
Now how strange is this. You do an article just when I and many others were banned online and during a conference of the UCL constitution unit for bringing up the English constitution and the lack of English Constitutionalists represented on their panel and lectures. The UCL constitution unit “experts” advise the government on constitutional reforms (their reforms always take away English rights).
We simply and politely asked questions about the English representation and lack of it at the UCL constitutional unit. We (English Constitution Party) are English not British. We are not represented in parliament, academia or anywhere.
“While prominent academics sit on Twitter arguing that the crisis unfolding in our universities represents a moral panic being whipped up by Right-wing campaigners” Jonathan Portes by any chance, only prominent in his own head.
Apropos of nothing, this article is, indirectly, yet another attack on the ‘great man’ (or ‘great women’) trope within historical thinking. It is essentially implying, for example, Mao didn’t create the Cultural Revolution, or the Red Guards – both created themselves, and Mao was just a conduit. There is no single person (or even a group of people) persuading the Gen-Zees to turn into Red Guards. This is an act of self-actualisation, in much the same way that the boomer generation in their youth created the cultural climate of the sixties through to the nineties, much to the mortification of their elders. Plus ça change.
Do you dispute the observations then about the silencing of those who would disagree with the “culture of victimhood”? How then do you define “education” at universities these days? How does one search for truth by silencing anyone who disagrees? Or, is that just a trope of historical thinking?
Do you dispute the observations then about the silencing of those who would disagree with the “culture of victimhood”?
Of course not.
How then do you define “education” at universities these days?
Absolutely dire.
How does one search for truth by silencing anyone who disagrees?
One doesn’t.
Or, is that just a trope of historical thinking?
Yep, that is all it is. I am a free speech absolutist, with a viewpoint somewhat right of center – this defines (crudely speaking) who I am politically and culturally. But I also see, I’m a product of my generation, as is my thinking. I don’t understand where the values-set of the current generation comes from, but then, understanding is not required, merely the recognition of difference – and this is as true of my generation and my viewpoint up against something from the past – say the India of the Maurya, or the England of Henry VIII. Rationality has not very much to do with it.
It sounds dismissive to categorize it as a “trope of history” as though just a passing fad, like others that have come and gone. History shows what happens when rationality and reason are replaced by group think. To dismiss it and allow it to happen again gives meaning to the saying, “History is repeated by those who choose to ignore it.”
The trope you quoted last illustrates precisely the point I am trying (rather clumsily) to make: I don’t believe history repeats (or rhymes) because of the actions of individuals or groups, there is no such thing as ‘those’, history holds no ‘lessons’, the flow of events that happen (in aggregate) is not dependent on the actions of individual leaders, it is just a reel playing out, with, seemingly no structure. Historians merely invent a bunch of reasons of why something happened, after the fact – a retrofitting. Which, as I’m sure you will have observed, falls out of fashion after a period, to be replaced by a different invention, on and on ad-infinitum.
I don’t expect you to buy this outlook, but that is what I wearily, after buying the narratives of historians for decades, and finding them to be in truth complete nonsense, now believe.
The people who persuaded the Gen-Zs to turn into Red guards are originally the intellectuals like Foucault and Judith Butler whose ideas spread and were taught to them as The Truth.
And remember,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead (1901-1978).
ctnd…Just as it was Marx and Engels who were at the origins of the disasters in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, producing Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and their small cadre of devotees, which were able to control whole countries.
No one controls anything unless a sizable chunk of the populace buys into them. It’s not even true to say the populace has to be desperate enough to buy into those types of ideas, because for example the current generations in the West are in no situation that can even remotely be described as desperate, but they have started turning into the inquisition for a theocracy that doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have any leaders that I would describe as such, and doesn’t have even a nominal purpose that I can discern.
Ergo, I conclude that other forces are the real drivers, nothing to do with great men or great women or historical arcs or anything like that. Patterns playing out over which humanity only has the mirage of control.
The other side of this is ““The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
No need to actually “buy in”, just to not act on your disagreement, or be too afraid to.
Free will, the freedom to choose what you think. All humans are bombarded with random thoughts both good and bad, positive or negative. But it is our choice which of them we hold onto and which we discard. It is the one thing in life we do have control over (“Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl). But in that one thing, is the key to the greatest power in the universe. To buy into a “culture of victimhood” is to voluntarily give up control of your own mind and life. No thank you. You don’t need “universities” for that. That is not “education” by my definition. It is a cult of brainwashing.
To buy into a “culture of victimhood” is to voluntarily give up control of your own mind and life
Your namesake pithily described the attractions of ‘victimhood’ as “the politics of the warm inner glow”.
I don’t understand what the author is saying. Conservatives are to blame for the campus meltdown because they are “focusing” (relentlessly?) and “talking”? Can someone explain what he means? How has talking about students as consumers created the current situation and what conservatives are engaged in such talk, and where?
I feel like there’s a conspicuous practice of shoe-horning in a “both sides are to blame” statement in every opinion piece now. It’s okay to acknowledge that colleges mostly make kids stupider these days and it’s entirely the fault of the radicals.
But he is right.
Once upon a time, faculty were considered the heart of the university, not students or administrators, and they set rigourous standards it was up to students to meet, or the students would fail. They were students, apprentices to their intellectual superiors, the masters, and there to learn.
Then this changed in the 60s, as students started demanding, and getting, a voice in the curriculum ( it should be “relevant”, etc.).
The for demographic and economic reasons as well as ideological, administrators started being seen as managers, not academics, and universities as businesses that needed to retain its clientele, students, and “the customer is always right”.
Emphasis became how to cater to students’ “needs”, how t help them succeed despite their inadequacies.
From “if you can’t do well, maybe you don’t belong here” to “if students don’t do well, it is the faculty/universities’ fault”.
There was a proliferation of professional but non-academic positions (counsellors, learning centers staffed by learning and literacy specialists, special accommodations for various learning disabilities, etc.) devoted to providing “support” to “at-risk” students.
Some of that was reasonable, but it went overboard into “coddling” students as customers who needed to be satisfied with their experience rather than students.
Right, but how are conservatives, who make up a dismal and uninfluential faction on college campuses, a party to the changes? How are conservatives to blame? Which conservatives have done what to encourage the present lunacy?
Depends on what you mean by conservative I guess.
It can mean “not Progressive”, which often means libertarian or neo-liberal, believing in the ultimtate goodness of market forces, or it can mean traditionalist.
Here I mean the former led the drive to treat universities as businesses, while the latter did nothing, or failed, to stop it.
Niall Ferguson explained how Progressives conquered History departments while conservatives like him were basically not paying attention…
Conservative in these pages generally means, you know, conservative. I don’t think the author is referring to some political agnostic. Anyway, you still didn’t answer my question. Which conservative(s) coerced the progressive majority at what university to treat that school as a business?
This maybe applies less to UK universities than those in the US and Canada? (I am Canadian.)
I am not familiar enough with the Uk situation, but it sure applies to the latter.
And I still maintain that at least in the Us and Canada, “conservative” usually means economically libertarian/neoliberal, even for those also socially conservative, and often those values conflict, rather than traditionalist, but maybe not in the UK.
“Which conservative(s) coerced the progressive majority at what university to treat that school as a business?”
This was usually led more by business and economics faculty, and some conservative politicians.
Those who objected were old-fashioned liberals and traditionalists, and marxist types.
But it actually ended up to the advantage of Progressives, in one of life’s many ironies.
I’m American, educated at an American university. Even in the late 80’s-early 90s there were effectively zero openly conservative profs on the faculty at my large State U, and if they were right of center, they didn’t speak of it.
Who? Where? That was my original question and I feel further away from an answer than when we started. If conservatives own a share of the blame for the destruction of the academy, neither the author nor you have given me the remotest idea how that might be.
Here is Niall Ferguson explaining how the takeover of history departments happened:
See at 15:14
https://youtu.be/asc27lxtnas?t=1514
As yet another ‘academic of 30 years’ (recently retired), my experience was that the people who drove the market model through the universities in my country would not have been seen or have seen themselves as ‘conservatives’. I’d say that they were culturally/socially liberal and economically sort-of ‘Blairite’,
We sanitise EVERYTHING at a very young age, so strong personalities are labeled as bullies real bullies seem to get away with it and we are all kind to them .. the young have no chance to hone explore develop coping skills with anything! So when they finally get to Uni you have utter brats and those that are not brats dive into drugs and booze and switch off cause they cannot bear it and are unable to speak none seem to be able to tolaterst anything for longer then thirty seconds and a standard conservative is a far right extremist! And the Unis wonder why they have such a high suicide rate? Well done Blair et al ..
What blatant prejudiced nonsense Chris Chantrill! I cannot agree more with Katharine Eyre. It has become quite predictable here on Unherd that any feminist article (and those by Julie Bindell doubly so, because she dares to be a lesbian, not just a feminist) will be bashed unashamedly by a bunch of crusty old conservative blokes who do it so passionately one has no choice than to call them mysoginists. It is really starting to put me off the Unherd.
It is difficult to find words to describe those cohorts of self mutilating, delusional children who want to build the world around them as a gigantic protective cocoon so they do not have to learn anything, take any risks or experience anything, ever.
Truth is scary when it slams against our core beliefs, so we lash out.
Perhaps it is more the culturally available outlets than the content expressed in belief system shaping each generation. A different generational content, same human process. Race cannot be accurately identified. Now gender is facing the same problems.
tribe/gang, ceding personal identity to group label & group safety
personal ignorance, fear, intolerance
lemming, bully, righteous, intolerant
The French tried to control language nation-wide and it fails; English recreates itself every generation; and violent gangs in Africa roam in local isolation. It’s not what you do as long as you pronounce it right (or left) as the unconscious filter we all have of me-vs-them.
And additional is to recognize the world is not digital, but analog. When media (previously books and now computers) define digital reality in contradistinction to life, we choose bad solutions to irrelevant problems. So oscillates our ineffective activities. I think of the disastrous philosophies that spewed out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. That her words and her life were incompatible goes unnoticed.
My own research leads to understanding that it traces to physical: the damage to our endocrine systems by chosen technologies, war and hunger lead to inevitable conflict and violence of all types. Addiction to damaging substances: alcohol, narcotics, stimulants, hallucinogens.
Women eschew their Estrogen, and fear Men’s Testosterone so we move towards the neuter, more child-like than feminine. Mee too, the dominant imposing one’s view on others. And one intra-generation change that transitions is the Menopause, as surely as puberty happens.
Maybe, just maybe, the narrow focus on universities is blinkered. The public discourse over Brexit and Trump and now Johnson inhibits responsible careful thinking. Abuse at a personal level on social media is routine and widely spread aboiut, ‘retweeted’, as also for example is the Mail’s constant public abuse of Prince Harry and his wife. Students, all of us, have now become more aware of the sources of influences, and the means they have at their disposal, and the sources of control, generally less transparent. Students are to some extent simply reflecting the world around them.
I taught at a Tier 1 university. One day I waxed nostalgic for the way in which my generation signed up for classes (walking to the gym where you stood in line to sign your name on your professors’ roster and maybe chat briefly with him or her). My students told me their online registration culminated in putting their chosen classes into a shopping cart – ala Amazon’s style. The visual rhetoric of this was stunningly awful, an opinion I shared with them. The only solace was some of my students agreed.
We had all this in the 16th and 17th centuries pretty much over the same timeline with a similar cast of characters. Gustave Le Bon said – if the ordinary mass of people fail to take up an idea then eventually it dies. Time to regather the Sealed Knot it’s going to be a long haul. As a military man once said ‘you can’t beat resistance’ even the might of the United States firepower couldn’t overcome dogged resistance of the North Vietnamese.
Fascinating description of victimhood syndrome. It could almost have been written about life in the north of Ireland where certain communities have used there “victimhood” to justify their distrust and loathing of other communities.
So: essentially, what this article says is that the world’s changing and the author doesn’t like it.
Which, it strikes me, is the author’s problem.
You’re half right, it is the author’s problem, but it is also a problem for many others, and especially for those who go to university.
No, it really isn’t. I’ve been teaching at various universities for getting on for 30 years. Students are pretty much the same as they’ve always been.
Yes, subjects such as drama have been privileged “right-on” activist echo chambers for more than 30 years, students there are similar to how they’ve always been, if you live in that environment you probably won’t have noticed much difference. Unfortunately the ideological cancer is now infecting areas we actually need (like STEM), that’s why it’s becoming more important to push back against it.
Sure they are.
But remember,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead (1901-1978).
It is always only a small minority of people (cf. the Pareto Principle) that forms the intellectual vanguard that changes the way others think, or at least act, because they are forced to.
Or at least, that changes the way other small elite minorities think and act, while the vast majority just goes along or pretends to.
Indeed a small group can change things – for better or worse.
I think that the problem is essentially yours, David, as you didn’t understand a word that he wrote.
As I note above, I’m an academic of 30 years’ experience. Much of what Goodwin writes is nonsense. He started off as a pretty good analyst of the populist right; however, by now he is as blatantly partisan as any of the student activitists he thinks he sees.
It’s rather sad to watch a previously credible academic succumb to this kind of cherry-picking rubbish.
“As I note above, I’m an academic of 30 years’ experience.”
Exactly.
So when he takes on the extremists from the right he is a pretty good analyst, but when he turns his attention to the extremists from the left he is blatantly partisan? It could just be that you used to agree with him and now you don’t.
I am also an academic of over 30 years. He is spot on in my opinion.
I’m interested by this:
Students are pretty much the same as they’ve always been
This is a very neutral statement as the nature of said students has not been defined; we are simply told it hasn’t changed.
I agree on one thing. As a student 30 years ago, I encountered many irritating, sanctimonious idiots utterly convinced they were building utopia and trying to convert you to their cause. They are indistinguishable from current woke types in many ways. Where the world has changed is that 30 years ago they were free to express their views but nobody took any notice.
Oh dear! You don’t tell us why it is nonsense, you merely assert that it is. You don’t sound like an academic, David, much less like one of any standing..
Not all change is for the good.