Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?

by Mick Hume

Universities should be citadels of open-minded inquiry and freedom of speech. Yet, remarkably, the university campus has become a major new front in the war on free speech, on both sides of the Atlantic. What’s remarkable is not that academic freedoms are under assault – they have been threatened by outside forces since the first European universities were established in the Middle Ages. What beggars belief is that it is now students and academics themselves who are joining campus authorities in trying to impose new limits on free speech and free thinking in UK and US universities. Far from being ivory-towered bastions of freedom, our universities have come to see themselves more as a womb-like fortress to protect young people from dangerous words and ideas.