Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce at The Critic on the Sussex University fine of £585,000 by the Office for Students, for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom in the case of Kathleen Stock. It's an important first step in the battle for free speech in universities, and, perhaps, the end of student infantilisation.

University senior managers now aim to convert their institutions into “safe spaces”, rather than bracing environments where even difficult ideas can be discussed fearlessly.

When I was preparing to speak at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge in 2022, LGBT student reps claimed allowing the event to go ahead was “potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way”. Rather than reminding them that Cambridge isn’t a creche and they aren’t toddlers, the college master agreed that my presence would interfere with making Caius an “inclusive, diverse and welcoming home”.

Those trying to drive Stock out of Sussex were mostly students, and senior management should have treated their protests as a teachable moment. Instead, the response tacitly framed totalitarian slogans and emotional incontinence as on a par with serious academic endeavour.

The pandering and promises of emotional safety are in part an adaptation to undergraduates whose childhood was spent in a school system that encouraged them to obsess about their special identities and to think of themselves as mentally and emotionally fragile.

More than half of university and college students in the UK now claim to suffer from a mental health issue, often something nebulous such as ADHD, OCD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety or depression. A quarter say they have been formally diagnosed. A fifth are registered with their institution as disabled — twice the share a decade ago.

Such registration generally unlocks an “individual support plan” that grants accommodations such as extra time in exams, extended coursework deadlines and exemptions from presenting their work to their peers or being called on in class. But once more than a handful of students have been given them, it’s impractical not to grant them to everyone.

How to remember which students cannot be called on? Why set essays when a quarter of the class must be given extra time? And how can the university manage closed-book exams if more than a handful of candidates are entitled to extra time or separate rooms with fewer distractions? Accommodating this fragile minority ends up denying all students the chance to learn from coping with everyday minor challenges and increases fragility in everyone.

And now graduates are turning up in workplaces lacking resilience and expecting their colleagues to be riveted by their special identities. To humour them, employers sponsor “affinity groups” for people with minority sexualities, gender identities and ethnicities and for mental health conditions snazzily relabelled as neurodiversity.

In recent years they have scattered the calendar with quasi-religious observances such as Trans Day of Remembrance, International Asexuality Day and LGBT History month. They take knees, display the Progress Pride flag and denounce Trump.

Thankfully, a backlash is building….

I hope she's right.