Can't students have a mature discussion over whom they invite to their campuses? Flickr/Walt Jabsco. Some rights reserved.In an article for The Atlantic last week, loosely framed around the theme of “political correctness”, David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, bemoaned the apparent increase in recent years of “disinvitation” incidents at US universities: instances of “attempts by students to ban speakers from campus” for political reasons. Universities in America have been a battleground for unedifying and depressingly chronic culture wars since before the 1960s – they were as much a source of worry for Joseph McCarthy as for Allan Bloom. There they are considered crucial for understanding the political shape of things to come, gauging the extent to which the conservative right or liberal left are gaining ground in a conflict that shows no sign of receding.
Keeping an eye on campus activism must be a joyless, wearying task and it is at this point that most of us across the pond are likely to feel a little smug. After all, it is not a huge exaggeration to say that Britain skipped the culture wars entirely, instead ushering in liberalism with minimum fuss and discussion, and getting the bulk of it through parliament before The Beatles’ last LP. Nevertheless, there are some twenty-first century civic voices in the UK who enjoy engaging in a kind of ersatz version of the liberal-conservative stand-off, presumably wishing they could somehow get involved in – or as angry about – the real thing. With the absence of any substantive enemy in a society marked by a relaxed liberal consensus, some people evidently get their kicks criticising a monstrous tyranny of political correctness that does not actually exist in British public life.
The hysteria comes to Britain
It should not then be a surprise that British Universities have been open to some of the same farcical politicised scrutiny experienced in America. On Friday, The Times ran an editorial castigating those students and faculty members at the University of Oxford for their censoriousness. A number of them had signed a letter asking that the Oxford Union to withdraw an invitation to speak from the leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen. The editorial suggested that the signatories to the letter should consider whether they were in fact “too genteel to cope with university life”, that the academy should, above all, “understand the preciousness of free speech” and that – pace J.S. Mill – that individuals should be prepared to tolerate views that they find offensive.
