By admin 
I fear the new moral puritanism’s chilling effect on freedom of expression
A proportion of today’s young adults are an ugly product of schools and universities where tolerance, nuance and sensitivity have been dropped in favor of knee-jerk judgment, condemnation and public shaming.
— Joanna Williams, author of How Woke Won (2022)
Last week, an inquest at Oxford Coroner’s Court investigating the death of a 20-year-old Oxford University student who took his own life after being shunned by his fellow students heard evidence that there is a “pervasive culture of social ostracization” on the university’s campus. “Cancel culture,” the court heard, has become “established and normalized” and students treating each other this way has become a “pattern of behavior.”
I didn’t know this person. I read about it in the newspaper. An allegation made against him by another student appears to have led him into a severe mental health crisis when his peers — some of whom he considered close friends — chose to exclude him.
The story has stayed with me, and it has been in my thoughts all week. I know the pressure cooker environment of undergraduate life at Oxford, and — as I’ve written about here — I know what it’s like to be banished from a student tribe when you are deemed to have erred. Cancel culture as a meme didn’t exist when I was an undergraduate, but its cruel psychological underpinnings are as old as time. Slowly but surely, the practice has established itself as a feature of our life and times: It isn’t just on campus, it’s a prevailing feature of the zeitgeist.
And the story has stayed with me because I am, once again, a student. I’ve been thinking about doing another degree for a while: for career progression, to learn new techniques, for the chance to be critiqued by professors who are themselves writers. For the past weeks, instead of writing articles and copyediting and beetling away on my second novel, I’ve been studying for an MA in prose fiction.
A Brave New World
John Maier, a columnist and philosophy PhD student, wrote this time last year of a “censorious, retributive, and moralistic” campus culture in which everyday college life is kept in check by “many wildly unpredictable and exquisitely-honed sensitivities.” Students, he writes:
“terrorize their fellow students and police their activities, though invariably under the guise of promoting kindness, the collective mental wellbeing, or some equally sinister objective. In the manner of modern day Lord Chamberlains they would turn up to the university theaters and hammer lists of trigger warnings to the doors; satirical college magazines were shut down; each term brought with it a cause of outrage more unimportant than the last. The rule seemed to be that no gripe could be too manifestly unserious to fail to count as a veto on any collective enterprise. It was often difficult to know how far to be amused and how far disturbed by the strange ascendant mood.”
It doesn’t sound all that much fun. It sounds like something that belongs to a past era, to a pre-Enlightenment age in which freedom of expression and freedom of thought had to be carefully controlled. Would I find a version of that when I first set foot on campus, too?
My heart did sink at the introductory plenary lecture when one of the professors described the university as “proudly woke.” Worse still, the assembled student body gave her a hearty round of applause. She was responding to a newspaper article which claimed that “more than half of Britain’s universities are peddling controversial and radical woke ideologies on students.” Examples of concern listed in the article include trigger warnings, guidance on white privilege, unconscious bias training and race workshops for freshers, as well as outlawing certain words (such as mankind) that might cause offense.
None of this caused me too much concern. Trigger warnings (or to use the updated term, content warnings) I find a bit silly, because life doesn’t come with a trigger warning and life, after all, is the ultimate trigger, but if other people want to use them, so be it. Fashions come and go.
But the woke rally cry did catch me off guard. People can be woke or not woke — that’s up to them, that’s up to me — but the act of signaling a prevailing cultural attitude (what the academic and writer Terry Eagleton describes as “a passing phenomenon”) is a definitive shift from the behavior I used to see on campus back in the day. When I was an undergraduate, the university professors actively went out of their way not to endorse any ideological viewpoint other than the Enlightenment ideal that we should read and think widely and deeply and reach our own conclusions. When I was a postgraduate law student at Edinburgh University, there were the first stirrings of a newly invigorated Scottish nationalist movement that would ultimately culminate in the 2014 referendum in which Scotland voted to remain a member state of the United Kingdom. But on campus amongst the staff teaching us, it was barely mentioned. We were there to study the law, not to comment on what the law might one day be.
There’s always the risk of inferring patterns of behavior through the lens of media headlines. But the messaging that this is an interesting and fractious time to be a student is everywhere. Just over the weekend, for example, I read that a group of over two dozen top authors (with a wide range of political positions between them) including A.C. Grayling, Lionel Shriver and Ian McEwan, have signed a letter pleading with the UK Government to end “cancel culture” by implementing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act without delay. Literary freedom, they argue, is being “eroded” and universities are not taking sufficient steps to safeguard “humane and liberal values.” Grayling told The Times that he believed in promoting many of the causes that “wokeism” defended but regarded most “canceling” as a mistaken strategy that could have “a chilling effect on the freedom of expression.”
That’s when I started to get very worried indeed, not least because I frequently find myself wide open to calamitous misquotation. But is it really as bad as people are saying? Is freedom of speech on campus dead in the water? If you step out of line, will the forces of hell be unleashed?
University education and the oversight of our moral development
The philosopher John Gray writes in his treatise The New Leviathans (2023) that there is on campuses across the Western hemisphere “an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language.”
“In schools and universities,” he writes, “education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves. Enclaves of freedom persist,” he writes, “but a liberal civilisation based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.”
If that is right, it makes me profoundly sad. “The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement,” Gray concludes, “are in the decay of liberalism.” The tenets of classical liberalism were the foundations upon which I was taught and encouraged to engage with the world. If those have fallen by the wayside, it makes me feel unmoored, all the old values of live and let live and to each their own thrown overboard in favor of a strangely less tolerant collective state of mind.
Passing cultural trends
Don’t get me wrong: no one is expecting any university institution to be anything other than left-leaning. If you’re looking for the libertarian wing of the Conservative Student Association, you’ll spend a lot of time looking. And it would be a brave soul who turned up sporting a pair of President-Elect Trump’s gold hightop sneakers.
Also, it’s important to keep perspective. So much of the campus life I have experienced, and thoroughly enjoyed, over these past weeks feels very familiar. The bars are full every night, and the library remains a hotbed of sexual tension. It is, in these respects, as it always was.
But student life has never been easy. It can be quite a difficult time of self-understanding and self-fashioning, and it doesn’t always work out for people. Undergraduate circles can be socially ruthless, and some of us navigate them more seamlessly than others. Not everyone is a sparkling and socially nimble conversationalist, and it’s always interesting what people will and won’t accept. Meanwhile, the lines of acceptability are shifting. Times change. Tribes form all too easily.
“When young people come to university, they enter a laboratory of public life,” says Princeton Professor of Creative Writing Aleksandar Hemon:
“Identities that might be affirmed or discovered in university, they are always by necessity public. This is generally how identities work… acquiring a public identity, practicing an identity. It is a difficulty for a lot of students, from my particular point of view as teaching in universities for many years, that sometimes it is hard to be in that public arena of a university, particularly kids who might be a little more sensitive who spend time reading books in relative isolation. Suddenly everything is happening at the same time. It is a very sensitive time.”
That’s one of the reasons I worry about the reported trends of a campus culture of judgment, condemnation and canceling in which speakers are “no platformed,” statues are removed, buildings are renamed and people are fired for holding views a censorious few dislike.
“It refers to a general sense that on campus people must watch what they say and routinely self-censor so as not to prompt outrage,” writes Joanna Williams, a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium and author of How Woke Won (2022). “We urgently need a broader, public discussion about where this culture of condemnation and ostracism emerged from and why it thrives within universities. We need to examine why students think that passing judgment without knowledge of all the facts is actually ‘a proper form of accountability.’ Sadly,” she concludes, “it seems that a proportion of today’s young adults are an ugly product of schools and universities where tolerance, nuance and sensitivity have been dropped in favor of knee-jerk judgment, condemnation and public shaming.”
It makes me thankful to be an older student. I wouldn’t want to be navigating all these psychological undercurrents as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old. I don’t think I’d have done a very good job of it. And there’s a lot to be said for university-level further education as a fully-fledged adult.
But I’m hardly an outlier. Currently, 39% of undergraduates and 50% of postgraduates at UK universities are mature students (21+ for undergraduate degrees and 25+ for postgraduate degrees). Almost 11% of Birbeck, University of London’s student population of 10,867 are older than 50, and in the last academic year, the University of Edinburgh had 97 students over 70 years old. That makes me and my classmates, where the median age is something like 36, look like youngsters. In the US, adult learners accounted for 23% of all undergraduate students who enrolled in Fall 2022.
Nevertheless, there remains a prevalent “young student” narrative in society. But when I first told people of my plan, I got some shocked looks. They were curious but also, they were cautious. What was really going on, they wanted to know? Was I trying to reclaim my youth? One last ride at the rodeo before I could no longer pass for 25 (good genes and excellent moisturizer disguise my 41 years)? Had I grown tired of working for a living? It’s a strange quirk of Western hemisphere attitudes that we think of university education as a primer for real life. Get it out of the way quickly when you’re still a teenager, then off into the real world you go!