Free speech is dead at

universities - or so one of the local journalists would have it. His article in this morning's paper was an unusually serious one for a Sunday.

He points out, rightly, that he started his journalistic career at university by writing for the student newspaper. At least one of his colleagues did the same thing. I suspect most of them did. 

I remember the student newspapers from more than one university. Without exception they were left wing, often radical left wing. One was so left wing it might as well have been a second communist manifesto at times. The articles in them were often so controversial they made the mainstream media as well. 

I never contributed apart from a report on an "access" conference I attended in Birmingham one year.  I doubt many of the other students read that. They would have been more concerned with a new "compulsory" unit required of students from abroad. 

Of course future politicians also joined the party political clubs on campus but student politics at each higher education place I attended was a left wing affair. If you did not believe passionately in the latest causes then you were ignored - or shunned if you were foolish enough to try and argue with them.

There were staff like that as well of course. I knew who they were and what their thinking was. Like other students I tailored my essays in order to be sure I passed. The pressure to do that was immense and I am not a cat who likes confrontation. 

I suspect it is even greater now. It may not be true of the fee paying foreign students but it is true of the local students. There are required courses in politically correct subjects for everyone. Even the student studying geology finds there is a requirement to study indigenous beliefs about the landscape that have no relationship to what is accepted as the science. Any research project in psychology has to take into account "multi-cultural" ideas and beliefs. Reading lists focus on politically correct texts and thinking. No, I am not exaggerating I have seen the lists and read student essays that reflect all this.

Of course the idea of what a university should be has changed even more in recent years. Now it is openly said that they are there as job factories. Courses are taught in accordance with what employers are looking for rather than for the sake of learning. An "arts" degree in English or history or the classics is considered "useless" and something only the less able students will do. Parents tell me it is not what they want for their children. 

I suspect that "political correctness" is not helping any of this. It is considered "good" to be doing a course in the environmental sciences or genetics or robotics. If you must do an arts degree then it should be in gender studies or indigenous culture - both worthy things in themselves but surely no more important than any number of other things? 

I wonder what the function of a student newspaper really is now. There is so much more "on line" activity. People can throw out their ideas at a distance - just as I am doing now.  Students who disagree with the editors of the student newspaper can publish something on line. Do they do it?

I doubt it. Perhaps I am wrong but I suspect the social pressure to agree, to appear to believe in what is being expressed, is very strong. It may be that "free speech" has never really been there and that, if there was any, it is dying from fear.