Once upon a time, universities were places where students went to learn how to think and to open their minds. Where ideas could be debated openly and freely. Nowadays, students go to learn what to think and to have their minds closed off and cauterised.
Many students are completing a three or four year degree, even at high profile colleges, with below-basic critical thinking skills. These students “can’t make a cohesive argument or interpret evidence”.
At the same time, faculties are almost completely dominated by left-wing academics who enforce a rigidly ideological intellectual culture. As writer James Delingpole puts it, it’s as if, on enrolment, students are presented with a big book, emblazoned with the words, “THIS IS WHAT YOU THINK”. On any given topic, all students can do is refer to the Big Book and dutifully parrot what it tells them to think.
Heaven help any hapless student who dares say otherwise.
A new study has found that one in four Australians feel they’ve had to suppress their social and political views out of fear of being cancelled.
Anecdotally, current and recent students relate that they quickly learn to keep their mouths shut, lest they be brow-beaten by other students, even their lecturers. A student who confessed in a lecture to being a Christian was told, point-blank by the lecturer that, “Then you’re a fascist”.
To live a life in which you don’t say honestly what you think is to really live a very “thwarted and blighted life”, author Douglas Murray says.
Woke corporations like to babble about “bringing your whole self” to work. What that means, in reality, is that flaming degenerates in dresses are free to fondle kiddies in the school library, but conservatives are fit only to be driven off-campus by a screaming mob of wobbling landwhales and emaciated soyboys in black masks.
The Cancel Culture and Acceptance in Australia – Exploring Australians’ Acceptance of Others and their Worldview report, led by social demographer Mark McCrindle, surveyed over 1,000 people across the country.
The study found younger Australians are the most affected with nearly half revealing they found it hard to be their “authentic self for fear of judgment or exclusion”.
Even at the once-home of the Free Speech Movement, dissenters from far-left orthodoxy are violently mobbed by Antifa thugs. Visiting speakers are attacked and campus venues vandalised and burned.
Independent polling of Australian universities found that:
- 41% of students feel they are sometimes unable to express their opinion at university
- 31% of students have been made to feel uncomfortable by a university teacher for expressing their opinion
- 59% of students believe they are sometimes prevented from voicing their opinions on controversial issues by other students.
Mr Murray said he hopes Australians do not “pipe down” and suppress speaking what they honestly think.
“I urge them as soon as possible to get out of that, get better friends, better circles of people around you, more open-minded people, you’ll have a lot more fun and you’ll get a lot further,” he told Sky News host Rita Panahi.
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They’ll certainly learn a lot more.
A favourite sneer of groupthinking cultists is that anyone who disagrees with them is “a graduate of Facebook University”. As it happens, students are more likely to learn new ideas on Facebook than on campus.
- 58% of students feel they are more exposed to new ideas on social media than at university
- 45% of students believe social media plays a bigger role in shaping their opinion than what they learn at university.
This might all seem like just so much ivory tower nonsense, but the stifling culture of universities has real-world consequences.
Clinical psychologist and author Dr Jordan Peterson says we can blame “appalling” education systems for young people’s “unthinking, unidimensional compassion for the so-called oppressed”.
Dr Peterson said there are faculties of education that are “corrupt beyond comprehension” and have done a “dismal and wretched job for 70 years”.
“And so these ideas are promoted in universities and almost all the social sciences, I would say, and certainly in the humanities and now increasingly in the sciences,” he told Sky News host Rita Panahi.
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Remember when I wrote for Insight, about it being “time to bulldoze the universities and start again”?
I was half-joking, back then. I’m only 10% joking, now.