I know it’s a waste of time, but let’s a weave our way through the Toby Young piece shall we dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
“Applications for degree courses are significantly down”. Because the birth rate’s down. Proportionally, they’re up.
“And why is it that a poll last week suggests this is no blip but part of a long-term trend?” The Sutton Trust found more scepticism amongst 11 to 16 year olds.
“The universities system is no longer a machine for guaranteeing future wealth and status”. Ah. The educational and social benefits of HE when you massify them might not have same the same signalling feature as previously. OK.
“They have increasing difficulty finding any kind of employment”. Hold on. Isn’t unemployment among recent graduates at its lowest level for more than about 25 years?
“Colleges have become seminaries of politically correct nonsense – Left-wing madrassas whose purpose is not to disseminate knowledge and promote understanding but to suppress politically incorrect facts and stifle debate”. Ah! Snowflakes!
“Blair was so keen to expand Britain’s universities … he wanted half of all school-leavers to … come under intense pressure to toe the progressive line in institutions which had already become little more than dogmatic hothouses”. If only he was this clever.
“68 per cent of undergraduates support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour – the highest ever recorded student backing for the party – while Conservative support has crashed to 15 per cent”. Now I wonder why that might be.
“the mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If in Manchester University’s students’ union building, defaced”. It was their building and they painted over it with Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise.
Then “hounding of Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar by his academic colleagues for daring to suggest the British empire wasn’t an unmitigated evil”. There was some debate on campus about his views. Isn’t that what we want?
“Student politics... policing of thought crimes... ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’ and ‘ableism’ – although not anti-Semitism, which has become a characteristic of the Corbynite Left”. Let’s not pretend that student politics doesn’t feature loads of anti anti-semitism campaigning.
“aggressive no-platforming of anyone with Right-of-centre political views”. Any examples?
“treatment meted out to dissenters – not least to those undergraduates who dared to vote Brexit and were brave enough to say so”. Such as?
“violent protest against Jacob Rees-Mogg when he attempted to give a speech at the University of the West of England”. HE GAVE THE SPEECH. THEY WEREN’T STUDENS.
“Other speakers who’ve been targeted by ‘anti-fascist’ student mobs include, bizarrely, the feminist Germaine Greer, the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell... [HOUSE]
...and Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer at King’s College London who was prevented from giving a talk at his own university’s students’ union entitled ‘The Scientific Importance of Free Speech’.”
Greer- Tick. Tatchell- tick (both spoke). Perkins. If you don’t know him his “science” was found out to have all sorts of flaws in it- timeshighereducation.com/news/welfare-c…
He’s a mate of Young’s that argues that the welfare state will stimulate the growth of an “employment-resistant personality profile” by increasing the number of children born into unemployed households
And his talk went ahead after a short postponement.
“The rise of identity politics …has meant that white students, particularly heterosexual males who are comfortable with their own biological gender, have been made to feel increasingly guilty” literally no evidence for this
“In America, liberal-arts colleges with a reputation for white-bashing and anti-free-speech protests have already seen a steady decline in enrolments – and the more liberal the university, the greater the fall in student numbers”
Liberal arts majors have been falling, across the board, for five decades. hechingerreport.org/with-enrollmen…
There is something going on here though. There’s a right wing fear that University participation is the cause for a twentysomething shift to the left.
That won’t be the housing crisis, or student debt, or precarious employment. It can’t be the failure to tackle baby boomers hoarding their wealth. It MUST be some made up No Platform crisis or leftie academics.
The desire to explain youth-ish shifts in politics as something Universities have done rather than wider and economic and social trends is strong on the right, and quite dangerous. Hey ho.
