The finest minds are not crafted by universities running scared of the PC brigade

IT is believed to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy — and the one most likely to appeal to aficionados of Quentin Tarantino’s violent blockbusters.

Titus Andronicus is certainly the Bard’s bloodiest, charting a brutal cycle of revenge involving Titus, a general in the Roman army, and Tamora, Queen of the Goths.

More than 400 years after it was written, the play retains the power to shock — but it is unlikely that many young undergraduates today will have studied it.

That is because it is no longer widely taught; it is considered simply too shocking and politically incorrect, containing as it does rape, murder and severed body parts.

Another title seen as inappropriate is cult fiction bestseller American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. The violence and misogyny in its pages are also deemed beyond the pale for many students of English literature.

As John Sutherland, emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London, has observed: ‘Justified or not, we are imposing on higher learning a climate of intellectual caution.’ Professor Sutherland is right: our campuses have fallen prey to an absurd culture of political correctness.

The Mail reported yesterday that some tutors have been reduced to issuing ‘trigger warnings’ to students about the content of courses that might offend or upset them, before any teaching begins.

Archaeology students are told that during their courses there may be images of bodily remains (undoubtedly a jaw-dropping revelation for anyone who signed up to study vanished cultures).

Tony Pollard, a professor of conflict history and archaeology at Glasgow University, said he had issued ‘trigger warnings’ while teaching about the Falklands War.

He said for one class he had collected British tabloids from 1982 to use as a primary source. He was ‘concerned about six copies of the Daily Star, which included photos of topless women’.

Professor Pollard said: ‘Determined not to offend my students or prompt a complaint, my first inclination was to remove the pages but I did not want to censor content, particularly as some of these images reflected on the jingoistic coverage of the war — showing models sporting a sailor’s cap or toting a rifle.

‘I settled for a trigger warning at the beginning of the session: “If you are going to be upset by images of semi-naked women don’t look at the Daily Star, pick one of the other papers”.’

It is worth pondering what previous generations might have made of this tripe, particularly those who at a young age were sent to die in conflicts such as the Falklands.

There was no guarding them from witnessing, or experiencing, far greater atrocities.

Stirling University students were given a ‘trigger warning’ before watching a YouTube video titled Damsel in Distress that analyses how female characters are treated in video games such as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda.

Of course, this revelation also begs the question of why on earth this was deemed to be a subject fit for academic discussion.

Trauma

The practice of issuing such warnings began in the US, where some colleges highlighted material containing references to subjects such as rape, suicide, abortion and racism that might upset undergraduates who had experienced trauma.

Examples included a request that Ovid’s Metamorphoses be ‘flagged’ as a poem about rape and that warnings be issued for classic novels such as F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

The feminist Dr Naomi Wolf, recently a university lecturer in Victorian sexualities, said: ‘Trauma from sexual or other assault and abuse is very real and “triggers” are real for victims of abuse.’

Speakers are banned from campuses if their views are deemed to be potentially offensive — a practice known as ‘no-platforming’.

Remarkably, 40 per cent of student unions also have ‘no-platforming’ policies in place against speakers who may prove offensive.

The feminist author and broadcaster Germaine Greer defied a fierce campaign to stop her delivering a university lecture on the grounds that she had expressed ‘trans- phobic’ views — discriminating against transsexuals — by going ahead with the event, which was conducted under high security.

During the lecture at Cardiff University, Greer insisted in the bluntest of terms that she did not accept that post- operative men were women.

‘You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat,’ she said. ‘It still won’t make me change my mind.’

About a fifth of student unions in the UK uphold ‘safe spaces’, which refer to meetings that are welcoming to all but prohibit what is deemed to be discriminatory language.

Earlier this year, a student at Edinburgh University was threatened with being thrown out of a meeting after being accused of violating ‘safe space’ rules — by raising her hand.

In September 2015, the University of East Anglia banned students from wearing sombreros they had been given by a local Tex-Mex restaurant because the student union decreed that it could be interpreted as racist for non-Mexicans to wear the wide-brimmed hats.

This nonsense runs entirely contrary to the proud history of intellectual debate and inquiry in our universities.

David Hume, Scotland’s greatest philosopher and a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, said the ‘truth springs from arguments amongst friends’. When the argument is prevented from taking place, in case it causes offence, ignorance reigns.

Theresa May agrees, saying recently that ‘everybody is finding this concept of safe spaces quite extraordinary’.

She said: ‘We want to see innovation of thought taking place in our universities. That’s how we develop as a country, as a society and as an economy.’

The no-platforming, safe spaces and trigger warnings are all part of a campus scene that, frankly, seems a lot less fun than it used to be.

Leading independent school heads said recently that many students think Freshers’ Week is a waste of time and money and would rather start courses straight away than spend the first days drinking.

This attitude clearly reflects debt worries — and the abstemious approach is probably a good deal healthier than the drink-sodden campuses of old, most famously portrayed in Kingsley Amis’s comic novel Lucky Jim.

Perhaps the ‘intellectual caution’ that bedevils our universities reflects the values of a generation that simply isn’t as carefree as its predecessors.

But our society also thrives on the notion that causing offence is to be avoided at any cost — and believes that breaching the perceived consensus of opinion is an outrage.

Crucibles

In this context, universities, far from being crucibles of lively intellectual engagement, are merely microcosms of a wider society that brands as a pariah anyone who voices a dissenting view.

They help to perpetuate the politically correct narratives, spun by the ruling elite of the day, which underpin much of public life.

This is manifested in the endless ‘virtue signalling’ of our politicians, when they say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous (and, indeed, more so than everybody else).

Such behaviour is particularly conspicuous among Nationalists — the current custodians of our higher education system — whose own politics are often of the student union variety.

They also brook no dissent in their ranks and frequently seek to stifle public debate.

In 2013, Alex Salmond, then First Minister, was accused of attempting to pressure the principal of St Andrews University, Professor Louise Richardson, into toning down warnings she had made about the adverse impact of Scottish independence.

Against this backdrop, is it any wonder that our universities are full of no-platforming, safe space-seeking students, mollycoddled by misguided virtue signallers?