Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ � The Spectator:
This is what those censorious Cambridgers meant when they kept saying
they have the ‘right to be comfortable’. They weren’t talking about the
freedom to lay down on a chaise longue — they meant the right never to
be challenged by disturbing ideas or mind-battered by offensiveness. At
precisely the time they should be leaping brain-first into the rough and
tumble of grown-up, testy discussion, students are cushioning
themselves from anything that has the whiff of controversy. We’re
witnessing the victory of political correctness by stealth. As the
annoying ‘PC gone mad!’ brigade banged on and on about extreme instances
of PC — schools banning ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, etc. — nobody seems to
have noticed that the key tenets of PC, from the desire to destroy
offensive lingo to the urge to re-educate apparently corrupted minds,
have been swallowed whole by a new generation. This is a disaster, for
it means our universities are becoming breeding grounds of dogmatism. As
John Stuart Mill said, if we don’t allow our opinion to be ‘fully,
frequently, and fearlessly discussed’, then that opinion will be ‘held
as a dead dogma, not a living truth’.