A Generation of Sensitive Radicals

University campuses are a bellwether. What happens there today is the societal trend of tomorrow which is why it's important to know what they're doing.

From The European Conservative

By Abigail Darwish

University campuses are merely magnifying glasses of ongoing, wider societal dilemmas.

Freedom of expression has become a victim to the West’s ongoing cultural crisis. Whilst the Free Speech Movement of the ’60s apparently threw off the shackles on free speech, representing a pivotal turning point in the history of civil liberties, today we are faced with a new set of challenges. Academic institutions are meant to foster intellectualism and critical thinking; however, ideological fervour is increasingly eclipsing such capacity. The assimilation of Marxist dogmas into our institutions poses a challenge on university campuses across the West, and society more widely. 

According to The Economist’s Democracy Index in 2021, the past decade has witnessed a “sharp drop” in respect of civil liberties, including freedom of expression and media freedom. The push for European countries to fight ‘hate speech’—typically at the expense of important “political, religious, and artistic” freedoms—is a contributing factor to this “free speech recession.”  

Reflective of this recession has been a further deterioration in free speech on university campuses. With universities throughout the West magnifying contemporary issues of identity, an imposition of new and unprecedented restrictions on freedom of expression are on the rise. 

One particular strand of political extremism that has undoubtedly grown in prominence on university campuses has been the aforementioned Cultural Marxism. Broadly defined as a mutation of Marxism, it has recalibrated the ideological struggle from one of class, to one of identity. By extension, the political struggle to overthrow the system is now spearheaded by issues of race, gender, sexual identity, and so forth. It is now a notable feature across Western university campuses, both in the classroom and beyond. Indeed, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the summer of 2020, a new wave of censorship and political correctness surged with Marxist-based Critical Race Theory (CRT)—which uses race as a cross-disciplinary analytical tool to which claims that Western society is characterised by structural racial, sexual, gender inequalities—being implemented across academic institutions in the West. 

Once confined to the fringes of academia, CRT was disseminated through the BLM cultural frenzy and has now become mainstream.

In rejecting colour blindness, it opts to racialize academics. Among the numerous points of contention, one notable criticism is that it both demonises individuals—white, heterosexual men are considered the pinnacle of oppression–and it oversimplifies history. For example, CRT erases the history of Jewish persecution through categorising Jews as white and therefore, by CRT’s standards, part of the oppressor class. 

CRT has been adopted by top global institutions, such as Harvard University. Whilst this is primarily an American phenomenon, it has made its way across the Atlantic and into both public discourse and top university institution’s research in the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere.       

What perhaps unites North America and Europe more generally on this cultural issue is the presence of Cultural Marxism in university campus student culture. The International Marxist Tendency (IMT), a revolutionary Marxist organisation active in over 35 countries worldwide, has noted the success of #CommunismOnCampus campaign which was accompanied by the “raising of red flags on campuses worldwide.” One can walk through some of the top universities in the world based in London, Paris, and Berlin and routinely find Marxist event posters hailing intersectionality, smashing the system, calling for socialist revolution across the world, and so forth. Uniting all of these Marxist fantasies is the annual Marxist Festival held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). It hosts a wide range of socialist-Marxist speakers and politicians alike, including former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Overall, there is a cult of political correctness that is a part of class culture and student cultures. This tide of Marxism grows at the expense of freedom of speech, with students across the Western world protesting at particular speakers coming to their campuses. The students’ reasons range from the speaker’s deemed political incorrectness, to him representing a specific country—Israeli speakers tend to be the targets of, such as Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, at Oxford University, Cambridge University, London School of Economics, to name a few. Such abuses of free speech are unfortunately more common than one would hope. Earlier this year in May, the Oxford Union hosted the gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock who was forced to hide in a broom cupboard amidst trans protesting. It is clear that freedom of speech—something integral to democratic societies—is under attack. 

In tandem with the mainstreaming of CRT and political correctness on university campuses, the last decade has seen more obstacles to freedom of speech surface, recently in the form of student ‘safe spaces.’ According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, American undergraduates have become increasingly prone to a syndrome of vindictive protectiveness, whereby individuals attack anyone or anything that threatens their emotional well being. As such safe spaces have been established to ‘protect’ students from “words and ideas they don’t like.” Institutionalising political correctness has been detrimental to students’ “capacity to argue and reason.” Unfortunately, this phenomena has made its way across the Atlantic in the last decade. In 2018, a UK parliamentary committee inquired into ‘safe spaces’ and found this new phenomena on campuses inhibits freedom of speech because of its “illegitimate shutting down” of debate on campus. As such, universities are lowering the threshold of free speech for the sake of this peculiar kind of emotional vulnerability amongst some students. 

Drawing from these observations, it is important to appreciate that this onslaught of political correctness on university campuses functions on two levels, and as such, there are two different remedies to this. Ostensibly, political correctness has become a part of student culture (in the form of protests, specifically those silencing speakers deemed politically incorrect), equally political correctness has become more enshrined in the classroom (in taught disciplines such as CRT). For the former issue, some action has been taken at government-level. For example, in May 2023, the UK government passed the Freedom of Speech Act, which has been praised as a huge step for protecting and promoting free speech on university campuses, underlining the importance of debate and the exchange of ideas at academic institutions. For remedying the latter issue, that of taught syllabi, this is harder to implement. As universities are private institutions, independent of the government, little can be done in the way of dissuading the likes of CRT from being taught. This is why the U.S. has generally made strides in removing CRT from K-12 syllabi since 2021, but has not been able to tackle the sphere of higher education. 

The prospects of cultural Marxist dogmas, such as political correctness, are still murky. Whether the problem at hand will die down, remain unchanged, or worsen, is debatable. Whilst student political action on university campuses is not a new phenomenon, the last decade has produced an evermore sensitive generation of radicals. As aforementioned, this is concurrent with the deterioration in respect for civil liberties, such as freedom of expression and media freedom. The heightened demand for political correctness has equally engendered a greater threshold for committing ‘hate speech.’ University campuses are merely magnifying glasses of ongoing, wider societal dilemmas. At the heart of this issue is the fundamental imperative of preserving Western values, namely its commitment to upholding the pillars of freedom of speech. The results of this ongoing purge on such traditional democratic values depends on the extent to which we can protect and nurture these values, both in universities and country-wide.