{"id":28886,"date":"2014-11-25T12:22:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T17:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28886"},"modified":"2015-03-27T09:31:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T13:31:54","slug":"the-rise-of-the-stepford-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/25\/the-rise-of-the-stepford-students\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise of the Stepford Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> is disturbed that the very people who should be most welcoming of intellectual challenge and alternative points of view are the very ones who are most militant about “safe spaces” and allowing no platform to dissenting views:<\/p>\n

Have you met the Stepford students? They\u2019re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who\u2019s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If your go-to image of a student is someone who\u2019s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind\u2019s picture bank. Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It\u2019s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have. From freewheelin\u2019 to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation. My showdown with the debate-banning Stepfords at Oxford and the pre-crime promoters at Cambridge echoed other recent run-ins I\u2019ve had with the intolerant students of the 21st century. I\u2019ve been jeered at by students at the University of Cork for criticising gay marriage; cornered and branded a \u2018denier\u2019 by students at University College London for suggesting industrial development in Africa should take precedence over combating climate change; lambasted by students at Cambridge (again) for saying it\u2019s bad to boycott Israeli goods. In each case, it wasn\u2019t the fact the students disagreed with me that I found alarming \u2014 disagreement is great! \u2014 it was that they were so plainly shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed to conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive ideas.<\/p>\n

Where once students might have allowed their eyes and ears to be bombarded by everything from risqu\u00e9 political propaganda to raunchy rock, now they insulate themselves from anything that might dent their self-esteem and, crime of crimes, make them feel \u2018uncomfortable\u2019. Student groups insist that online articles should have \u2018trigger warnings\u2019 in case their subject matter might cause offence.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Stepford concerns are over-amplified on social media. No sooner is a contentious subject raised than a university \u2018campaign\u2019 group appears on Facebook, or a hashtag on Twitter, demanding that the debate is shut down. Technology means that it has never been easier to whip up a false sense of mass outrage \u2014 and target that synthetic anger at those in charge. The authorities on the receiving end feel so besieged that they succumb to the demands and threats.<\/p>\n

Heaven help any student who doesn\u2019t bow before the Stepford mentality. The students\u2019 union at Edinburgh recently passed a motion to \u2018End lad banter\u2019 on campus. Laddish students are being forced to recant their bantering ways. Last month, the rugby club at the London School of Economics was disbanded for a year after its members handed out leaflets advising rugby lads to avoid \u2018mingers\u2019 (ugly girls) and \u2018homosexual debauchery\u2019. Under pressure from LSE bigwigs, the club publicly recanted its \u2018inexcusably offensive\u2019 behaviour and declared that its members have \u2018a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter\u2019. They\u2019re being made to take part in equality and diversity training. At British unis in 2014, you don\u2019t just get education \u2014 you also get re-education, Soviet style.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill is disturbed that the very people who should be most welcoming of intellectual challenge and alternative points of view are the very ones who are most militant about “safe spaces” and allowing no platform to dissenting views: Have you met the Stepford students? They\u2019re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,10],"tags":[459,186,956,238,593,764],"class_list":["post-28886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-bureaucracy","category-liberty","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-millennials","tag-offensensitivity","tag-socialmedia","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7vU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28887,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28886\/revisions\/28887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}