But this doesn’t seem to have yielded a generation that feels safe. Instead, we have one that feels so unsafe they want to use political process to make things better. That, at least, seems to be the upshot of a new HEPI poll which revealed that (along with broad and rising support for censorship, trigger warnings, and firing problematic professors) 79% of undergraduates think students’ demands for “safety” should always be met. And a look at the factors driving this seismic change suggests a startling conclusion: that we should take “woke” claims of “trauma” much more seriously — but also wholly disregard “woke” claims about their origin.

For it’s not the universities encouraging young people to make “safety” a political demand. Rather, such calls seem to originate with students themselves. In the recent persecution of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, for example, administrators may have supported or at least failed to halt her harassment. But protests were led by undergraduate activists. One placard said “we were meant to be safe here”.

Nor do such demands start at university, but erupt in schools as well. In May, a British sixth-former was hounded out of her school for questioning consensus views on trans rights, and instead of defending her, the school apologised to other pupils for not maintaining a “safe space”.

I asked Andrew, head of sixth form at an independent girls’ school, what he thought was driving the hunger to be safe. He told me that some of it is grounded in reality: in his observation many of his pupils are “genuinely apprehensive about the future”. Their worries vary from the abstract, such as climate change, to more concrete fears about economics, the job market and declining prospects for home ownership — worries that are objectively far from groundless.

In the view of sociologist Matthew Goodwin, a key driver of the new safety-oriented intolerance is the internet. The deputy head at one London state school, James, backs this up: in his view, social media makes it “much easier” to “isolate oneself from opposing (and discomforting) arguments”. His view resonates with Andrew’s observations of how his pupils behave: “Those who are most concerned about safety”, Andrew says, “are the ones who are very ‘online’.”

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And indeed, a defining feature of online sociality is filter bubbles, where we come to think everyone shares our opinions because algorithms filter out content from anyone who doesn’t. One pupil, Andrew tells me, goes even beyond the algorithmic hygiene of her filter bubble to create her own, proactively: she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she disagrees politically or philosophically”.

It makes sense, too, that a cohort accustomed to resolving conflict by muting, unfollowing or blocking disagreeable voices might struggle in real-world conflict. In the view of Anne, an American professor, “a big part of it is conflict aversion”, which means “any emotional discomfort they feel from disagreement (whether a peer or a text) is interpreted as a personal attack and ‘unsafe’”. In response to this poverty of interpersonal skills, she says, there’s an expectation that “professors are responsible to create conflict-free and tension-free environments”.

This tallies with a recent report on American campuses, where Title IX protections intended to shield women against sex discrimination have become an expansive means of refereeing interpersonal disputes, one Title IX coordinator tells the author “she sometimes thought of her job as running ‘The Break Up Office’”. In other words: instead of resolving an unhappy break-up among themselves, students seek redress via official sex-discrimination policies.

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Another factor that might contribute to such conflict aversion is well-meaning school policies designed to protect schoolchildren. My own daughter isn’t a university student at the other end of her educational journey; and yet her (lovely, attentive, empathetic) primary-school teachers regularly drum home the message that intractable conflict is best resolved by telling a teacher. It’s often struck me that if widespread, over time such policies might well result in more adults whose first response to interpersonal conflict would be seeking resolution via an authority figure.

And perhaps this starts before schools, too. Free Range Kids, a project and book by American mum Lenore Skenazy, argues that in the name of “safety”, over-protective parenting — or, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it in 2018, “coddling” — is undermining young people’s agency, confidence and resilience.

And it’s difficult to dispute that a fixation on “safety” pervades both products and services aimed at children and also behavioural norms. This inevitably shapes children’s experience, even in family cultures that aren’t especially anxious about safety. I realised how deep this reaches when my own daughter became agitated because I started the car moving, slowly, on our driveway, before she’d finished fastening her seatbelt.

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This still doesn’t feel like the root of it though. One of the first student eruptions of this nature to make the news took place at Yale in 2015, where two faculty members, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, wrote to students encouraging them to tolerate even offensive Halloween costumes. In the ensuing uproar one young woman told Christakis that the college “is no longer a safe space”.

What shook the world about the 2016 Yale video, and remains startling about the many subsequent similar scenarios at schools, universities and the wider world is how radically dysregulated many politically-engaged young people genuinely seem to be. They actually are that upset. For many proponents of “wokeness”, political issues genuinely seem to cause dramatic emotional highs and lows — so much so in fact that the phrase “literally shaking and crying” is widely used to parody this kind of high-pitched activist tone.

But while the fragility in question often seems to be channeled into political activism, what if it doesn’t originate there? A 2020 Pew study reported that the combination of progressivism and youth strongly correlates with mental health difficulties, a finding gleefully seized upon to claim that progressivism drives people crazy. But it’s possible that this has the causality backwards, and it’s more that unhappy people seize upon what Jason Manning has called “Victimhood Culture” to justify an already-endemic state of maladjustment.

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Consider this short article, published by an Australian university, which describes “coping with a meltdown”. Symptoms of a “meltdown” reportedly include shaking, terror, poor decision-making, and destructive self-soothing, and overwhelming emotions such as helplessness, anger and fear. According to the article, we all experience “meltdowns”. Except actually no, we don’t.

And the “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.

The child development theorist Erik Erickson characterised the first stage of infancy as where we develop a foundational confidence that a caregiver will be there when we need them. And where this is interrupted by traumatic experiences, the sense of chronic threat can last forever. As psychotherapist Dorothy Scotten argues, pre-verbal experience of abuse or neglect then means “the infant loses the sense of safety and begins her/his life in a state of psychological mistrust and instability”. Long-term effects of such trauma can then include “a feeling of helplessness, residual fear and lack of safety” along with self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, difficulty forming relationships, and overwhelming emotions such as “infantile rage”. Not a million miles, in other words, from the supposed symptoms of “meltdown”.

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Another paper describes a traumatised child who expressed “feelings of being unsafe and inadequately protected by caregivers and an intense behavioural regression to an infantile level at home”. This included acting out; the child “would camp outside his mother’s bedroom door pretending to be a ‘lost puppy’ wanting to be taken in”. The longing this expresses for a place of absolute safety is echoed in Christakis’ confrontation with the Yale student body. Here several tearful young women berate Christakis about how Yale was a “home” for them — but now, as one puts it: “Somehow this home is broken.”

It seems unlikely that every single one of these young people has been profoundly physically abused. What about neglected, though? In the Seventies, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth documented the way young children form a strong attachment to a single caregiver. They concluded that attachment took three broad forms: secure, ambivalent or disordered.

Most attachments styles fell within secure or ambivalent patterns, they found. Children with secure attachment were confident that their caregivers would respond in an attuned way; those with an ambivalent attachment pattern could either be anxious and clingy or avoidant. And disordered attachment was found in neglectful, frightened or frightening caregiving situations such as addiction or violent homes.

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Are we looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare. In 1980, the year after I was born, it was estimated that around a third of mothers had jobs. By 2011, though, a UCL study reported that among the middle class, stay-at-home mums of young children were increasingly a rarity concentrated among the richest and poorest, while in the middle class nearly 70% had jobs before their child was one year old.

A great deal of research has been done on the effect of childcare on attachment. Results vary considerably by geography and the age of children, but a review of results concluded that there’s likely to be some effect. And, importantly, especially where care is poor-quality and infants are very young, long hours in childcare pose a significant risk factor for disordered attachment.

There are, to my knowledge, no studies on whether any correlations exist between an institutionalised early infancy and an unhappy young-adult preoccupation with “safety”. But if there is a correlation, it might also explain the greater American prevalence and intensity of this type of dysregulated youth politics: American women have no right to maternity leave, and one in four American mothers is back at work within two weeks. That’s a lot of tiny babies in institutional childcare.

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Something as seismic as the change in sensibility we’re seeing is unlikely to have a single cause. But the step change in childcare uptake happened just long enough ago for those kids to be arriving in adulthood now. It’s possible that genuine worries for the future, internet filter bubbles, and a culture of safetyism have landed, for some, on psyches that were fragile almost from birth.

And it’s possible that this subset was predisposed to fragility, by an early infancy spent in “care” settings long on stimulation, and short on attuned caregiving and cuddles — a setting inimical to forming the kind of secure or even ambivalent attachment patterns needed for healthy functioning as an adult. If this is so, it’s also possible that much of contemporary student activism isn’t really about race, gender, climate or whatever so much as it is about young adults desperately trying to elicit the care from a new institution, that they missed out on in a different institutional setting long before they even formed conscious memories.

If this so, we should take student claims of distress and trauma more seriously – even as we dispute their origins. And we should also be cautious about taking such individuals’ political demands at face value. For it may be that some of our angriest activists have simply seized upon the opportunity offered by “Victim Culture” to make a renewed plea for something they craved as a baby, and didn’t receive: a reliable sense of being held, and loved, and safe.

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.

Evidence of this “purity spiral”, whereby members of a dominant ideological group become increasingly intolerant of those who hold other beliefs, is reflected in other findings. Support for removing memorials of potentially controversial historical figures has rocketed 25-points, to 76%. Support for establishing “safe space policies” has jumped 14-points, to 62%. Support for banning books that might cause offence — whether in terms of race, sex, religion, or politics — is up across the board. And support for stopping or disrupting events that students are not happy with has also more than doubled. “Some areas have seen less change than others”, write the authors, “but, overall, the pattern is very clear as the changes that have occurred are overwhelmingly in one direction – towards more support for restricting freedom of expression on campus. Moreover, the scale of the changes are often stark.”

I suspect three factors are colliding to weaken our universities, creating a generation of students poorly prepared for the more polarised world off campus, and pushing our world-leading institutions away from their founding mission to search for truth through free enquiry.

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The first is generational. Students who are currently finishing their first year at university were born in 2003-2004. They are Generation-Z, the Zoomers, who have simply had fundamentally different coming-of-age experiences than their Millennial or Generation-X parents.

Millennials and Gen-Xers came-of-age in the Eighties and the Nineties, sandwiched between Thatcher and Blair. Politics was turbulent but also more stable. People were generally committed to the two main parties. The agenda was more economic than cultural. And there was still a diverse range of voices in politics, media, creative, and cultural institutions, which helped to ensure that people were exposed to alternative views. The growing education-based polarisation between graduates and non-graduates had not yet intensified. And the far more liberal graduate class had not yet taken over the institutions.

Zoomers, in sharp contrast, have grown up in a completely different world. They were 13 when the Trump and Brexit revolts erupted and they spent their adolescence living amid what political scientists call “affective polarisation” — a far more divisive, volatile, and emotion-led politics in which Remainers and Leavers, liberals and conservatives, have simultaneously became more positive about their own tribe and more openly hostile toward the opposing side.

Aside from being the first generation to witness a strong populist Right (UKIP) and a strong populist Left (Corbyn), they have been raised by parents who have more openly taken sides in this more polarised environment — symbolised by the 36% of Remain-voting parents who would “feel upset” if their child married a Brexiteer, and the 21% of Brexit-voting parents who would feel similarly if their child were to marry a Remainer.

Given this polarisation is underpinned by the growing educational divide between more culturally liberal graduates and more conservative non-graduates, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that the university students who are self-selecting into universities have also become more focused on prioritising the needs of their own tribe and more willing to ostracise others.

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Secondly, regarding ideology, Zoomers are also the first generation to have been born, raised and immersed in what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call “Victimhood Culture” — the rise of a new moral code in Western societies characterised by an overwhelming concern with deriving social status through claims to victimhood, extreme sensitivity to offence, and a strong dependency on turning to third parties to resolve disputes.

Unlike moral cultures in the past, which stressed dignity and honour, and put an emphasis on toleration and negotiation as a route out of conflict, victimhood culture encourages students to stress their oppression, marginalisation, and victimhood as a means of acquiring status from their peers; while simultaneously turning to third parties (i.e., university administrators) to punish those who are seen to be “oppressing” or merely challenging their safety and beliefs.

This is reflected in the finding this week that 64% of students now think that universities should “consult special interest groups (i.e. religious or gender societies) about on-campus events”, up from only 40% in 2016. 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.

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The rise of this victimhood culture is also, almost certainly, being encouraged by the broader ideological evolution of Britain’s universities. As my research, and that of others, has shown over the past four years, these are morphing into “ideological monocultures” where the ratio of Left-wing to Right-wing academics has increased from three to one in the Sixties to around eight to one today. Much like institutions in America, it is increasingly hard to find visible conservatives or other nonconformists on campus. Some students will now go through their entire degree never really knowing one at all.

One basic problem with monocultures is they embolden the most radical activists to lash out against others, safe in the knowledge that the moderates won’t challenge them. In turn, significant numbers of academics openly admit to being biased against conservatives, including one in three who would not hire a known Brexit supporter. Most conservative and gender critical scholars say they are self-censoring on campus, as do one-quarter of all university students, while those on the right or who do not subscribe to the new orthodoxy on campus are especially likely to do so, underlining the impact of this new moral culture.

Nor is this lost on students themselves. 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, the students who are actually sitting in their seminars and lectures are increasingly taking the opposite view — the latest report finds that 38% of students think “universities are becoming less tolerant of a wide range of viewpoints”, up from 24% in 2016.

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Third, while this is being reinforced by social media (Zoomers are the first generation to have spent their entire lives online), within the context of the university it is more accurately being driven by organisational changes. Increasingly, over the last two decades, these generational and ideological factors have collided with a new ethos in universities which prioritises “student satisfaction” as the main, if not only, metric that really counts.

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. Almost all the changes that are being imposed on higher education for largely political reasons — the decolonisation of reading lists, the imposition of ideological litmus tests such as “diversity statements” when applying for jobs or grants, decisions regarding who speaks and works on campus and who does not, and the transformation of universities more generally into hyper-political organisations — are now often made in the name of “student satisfaction”. This is further encouraged by the rampant spread of university bureaucracy, in which cowardly administrators — none of whom really understand the point of academe — routinely bend over backwards to ensure that student-led demands to have events removed, academics investigated, and new restrictive policies implemented are fully met and satisfied.

It is perhaps no coincidence that amid these changes, only 25% of British people now think universities are offering “value for money”, and more people would rather their child studied for an apprenticeship than went to university. What a tawdry end for our once world-leading institutions.

On a freezing January night in Chicago – while a polar vortex was sucking degrees away from the normal winter cold – an actor called Justin Smollett was walking home from a Subway sandwich shop.

Smollett is black and gay and, in America, quite famous: he stars in a TV hip-hop drama called Empire. He hates Donald Trump and often says so.

What happened next made him even more famous. Smollett was beaten up by two men wearing Donald Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ hats. “This is MAGA country,” they screamed. Then they poured bleach over him and put a rope around his neck. And ran off.

Smollett went home, called the police, issued a statement, and the machine took over.

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First, the media machine. Relatively mild stuff from the Washington Post: “To many, the Smollett incident — and the political nature of the assault — is yet another reminder for many black gay Americans that this president’s vision of a ‘great America’ does not appear to include them.”

Then it really got going. Jamil Smith of Rolling Stone tweeted, “The brutal attack on him in Chicago appears to be yet another example not just of further moral decay, but of the brand of terrorism that still doesn’t seem to spark enough response by Americans.”

ABC did an interview with Smollett in which he cried. They asked him who he was angry with and why. Could he ever properly recover?

Then the politicians waded in. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, two Democrats running for the 2020 presidential nomination, called it a “modern-day lynching.” The Democratic party’s biggest star attacked one of the media outlets that had vaguely suggested the facts of the case were not yet proven or might be merely a mugging with a racial overtone. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted:

“There is no such thing as ‘racially charged.’ This attack was not ‘possibly’ homophobic. It was a racist and homophobic attack. If you don’t like what is happening to our country, then work to change it. It is no one’s job to water down or sugar-coat the rise of hate crimes.”

Perhaps you can guess what happened next.

The initial story – seized upon with such passionate certainty by the mainstream media and by senior politicians – turned out to be, well, less than solid.

Smollett is now accused of making it up. Or, even odder, hiring people to attack him. Sources allege Smollett paid a couple of Nigerian brothers, one of whom is his personal trainer, $3,500 — and gave them a bit extra to buy the rope. They were arrested and released without charge.

And then someone gave the game away – the wider game that goes so far beyond this troubled young man and speaks more of the troubled country he inhabits. Nana Efua Mumford, of the Washington Post, wrote this:

“If Smollett’s story is found to be untrue … The incident would be touted as proof that there is a Leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists. It would be the very embodiment of ‘fake news.’ And that reason, more than any other, is why I need this story to be true.”

“I need this story to be true.”   

Wow.

Does nobody at the Washington Post, or anywhere else, care any more about what is true? I mean, in the old-fashioned sense, the Watergate sense? Is that not a thing anymore? At the Post? At ABC News? At CBS or CNN?

Or indeed at Fox News. The Right-wing online brigade – and the Fox team – have fallen on the Smollett story with great gusto, having, of course, ignored it at first. In other words, they too are not exactly innocent parties in this train-wreck.

But that is not the fight that matters. What matters is that, in Trump’s America, those who used to be guardians of civility and judiciousness have deserted their posts. It’s arguably the president’s greatest achievement. He has turned everyone into an image of himself.

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The reason why l’affaire Smollett matters so much is the clarity of the disaster. It will lead to searching questions in the Democratic party about the nature of the campaign they want to run in 2020. Up to now, victimhood has been the new apple pie on the American Left. Poor Justin Smollett – wealthy and well-connected and successful – seems to have been trying, albeit in a bizarre manner, to get himself a piece of the action.

As the truth emerges (and Smollett could face charges himself if the incident is proven a hoax), the centrist Democrats will be keeping those ill-judged tweets and statements from their woke opponents up their sleeves. The question, they will pose, is: does the party want to be the home of faux-victims? Can it stand for more? It is possible that Smollett has done real damage to the Left. But is is also true that he has provided what Americans call, ‘a teachable moment.’

The centrists will say: do not fall for victimhood stories from trendy folks from Los Angeles. Do not squeal at Americans about their homophobia or racism (both of which are real of course) in a way that drowns out messages about health-care and employment.

In this, Justin Smollett has done some folks a favour.

UPDATE: Justin Smollett has now been arrested on suspicion of filing a false report.