Sophie Spector, pictured, thought her college at the University of Oxford should give her special treatment, including extended deadlines, because she suffered from anxiety and depression, and was, in her own words, ‘a really slow reader’
As anyone who has read a newspaper in the past few months will know, this planet boasts two kinds of snowflakes.
One is an exquisite natural wonder, formed from a single tiny crystal, which falls through the sky, attracting cloud droplets which accumulate in dazzling patterns of ice.
The other is rather less of a wonder. Formed from a single tiny brain cell,
it wafts through the British university system in a cloud of victimhood, attracting similarly strident comrades who accumulate in student unions and spaces where they are safe from criticism and hurtful ideas.You may think I am being harsh. Indeed, when I first read the headlines about the so-called 'snowflake generation' — a generation of students intolerant of dissent, who melt when forced to confront tricky challenges, suffused with a sense of their own entitlement — I wondered if they had been exaggerated.
As a former lecturer myself, I knew things in our universities were bad — but surely they weren't that bad?
But recently, I read two stories about my own alma mater, Oxford, which confirmed all my worst fears.
The first concerns a former law student at Jesus College, Catherine Dance, who is suing the university for loss of earnings.
She claims that because the college refused to give her special treatment for her chronic anxiety — for example, she wanted to sit her exams in a private room with a laptop — she had to take a break from her degree, and therefore graduated a year late and missed out on a year's wages.
The second concerns one Sophie Spector, a former student of politics, philosophy and economics at my old college, Balliol.
Miss Spector thought the college should give her special treatment, including extended deadlines, because she suffered from anxiety and depression, and was, in her own words, 'a really slow reader'.
But the college refused, she fell behind and eventually she left.
The details are different, but the story is basically the same. Indeed, if you talk to anybody who works in British universities, it is a very familiar tale.
Of course, many students are relatively sane and sensible people. Thanks to the economic pressures of the modern world, the majority are also probably some of the hardest-working in history.
Indeed, last week's A-level results mean that at least 416,000 new students will be enrolling for university courses.
All the same, there is simply no denying that there now exists a pernicious culture of narcissism and self-obsession at our universities.
This began among a tiny group of Left-wing student activists — the apostles of 'safe spaces' (where people are protected from ideas that make them uncomfortable) and 'no-platforming' (when students proscribe, or refuse to give a platform to, speakers they disagree with).But it is now seeping into mainstream national life.Inside the classroom it is bad enough. One academic friend recently told me about a student who objected to receiving any criticism at all, no matter how well-intentioned or gently put.
The student simply believed that if she delivered her essays on time, she was entitled to get a First.
This, too, is a very common story.
Having been raised to think they are special, garlanded with praise and showered with A-grades as teenagers, students have come to believe they are entitled to success, whether they deserve it or not. If they fail, it is the university's fault — never theirs.It is outside the classroom, though, that the new student narcissism is most poisonous.
Just think, for example, of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which sought to tear down a little statue of the Victorian empire-builder and Oxford donor Cecil Rhodes.
Since the statute was high above a busy road,
where virtually nobody ever saw it, the activists could hardly claim that it made any difference to the people of Oxford.
But they didn't care about the people of Oxford. They only cared about themselves.In their own words, they felt 'oppressed and marginalised' by the statue, even though they had to go out of their way just to glimpse it. Merely walking down the street, in one of the most privileged educational institutions in the world, was apparently enough to reduce them to tears.If that sounds ridiculous, there is much worse where it came from. It is at Oxford, for example, that the university's Equality and Diversity Unit
advised students that if they avoided eye contact with each other, they might be in danger of committing 'racist micro-aggressions'.The ideal thing, of course, would be for our own students to ‘man up’. Alas, even those words are enough to lead to all sorts of feminist weeping and wailing in the halls of academe. And that tells its own story
In fact, there are so many examples of the cult of victimhood that I could probably fill every page in this newspaper, from the
students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, who complained that dishes such as 'Jamaican Stew' and 'Tunisian Rice' were yet more 'racist micro-aggressions', to the National Union of Students, which has tried to ban clapping and cheering because they could 'trigger anxiety' among sensitive students.All this talk of 'triggering' will probably baffle most readers over the age of 25. But it has become one of the favourite words of the student snowflakes, who are so frightened of being offended that they require 'trigger warnings' before having to deal with even the tamest material.
Like many very bad ideas, it has been imported from U.S. universities, where students have requested warnings before being exposed to such supposedly offensive books as F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby (because of characters' violence to women) and Virginia Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway (in which a character commits suicide).
Even Shakespeare's
The Merchant Of Venice is apparently too much for some students, who cannot handle his anti-Semitic portrait of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. And as for teaching Joseph Conrad's great novella
The Nigger Of The 'Narcissus', you can forget it.
You might have thought that the whole point of university is to challenge conventional wisdom and stretch students' minds — but according to today's student Left, you would be wrong.
The point of university, they say, is to provide a 'safe space', where sensitive little flowers can shelter from the horrors of the real world. Of course, students have always been idealistic to the point of extremism. Just think, for example, of those who campaigned against the Vietnam War in the late-Sixties.
As older readers will recall, the campaign reached its peak in the Grosvenor Square demonstration of 1968, when some 10,000 people battled hundreds of mounted London policemen.
But that merely set the stage for a wave of strikes and sit-ins in the late-Sixties and early Seventies, many of which came perilously close to self-parody.
To give just one colourful example, the University of Essex, which had been built in the Sixties in the fashion of an East German power station, was plagued by student unrest.
The low point was a so-called 'revolutionary festival', at which, according to one observer, 'a car was set on fire and a student and a mathematics professor struggled over possession of a hosepipe'.
For all their ludicrousness, though,
the protests of the Sixties and Seventies were motivated by genuine concern about the state of the world.It is true that sometimes students were protesting about parochial concerns such as exams and regulations.
But there was also a real passion about major international issues, from the wars in Vietnam and Biafra (which tried to secede from Nigeria) to the apartheid regime in white-dominated South Africa.
It was much the same story in the Eighties. Then, too, universities often fizzed with political enthusiasm.
Students joined campaigns calling for Nelson Mandela's release; they argued about the bloodshed in Northern Ireland; they donated time and money to help the striking miners; they demonstrated against Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government.Whatever you think of their goals, all these campaigns were motivated by genuine idealism, however naive.
And all were devoted to something far beyond the students' immediate horizons, from the future of Britain's coalmines to the plight of millions of black South Africans.
Today's student activists, however, are very different.
While their predecessors wrung their hands about the plight of others, modern students shed tears of self-pity. And although we live in a more globalised age than ever, our students' horizons have never been narrower.
The students of the Sixties never saw themselves as victims.
Quite the reverse, in fact: they knew they were privileged, often felt guilty about it, and were fired with an idealistic determination to help others less fortunate than themselves.
But today's students, despite their predominantly middle-class backgrounds, have been encouraged to see themselves as the suffering casualties of a cruel world.
Instead of recognising their own privilege, they see themselves as victims of oppression, which is why so many of them flocked to Jeremy Corbyn, who shamelessly panders to their sense of entitlement.
They see no shame in asking for special treatment; indeed, as any academic will tell you, today's students can hardly wait to proclaim themselves uniquely hard done by, and to demand compensation for their educational handicaps and mental disabilities, whether real or imagined.
As the U.S. psychologist Sean Rife puts it, in a society where 'victimhood has become the ultimate status symbol . . . the notion of quietly bearing one's trials has become passe'.Perhaps the most famous example of this is a deranged furore at Yale, one of the most prestigious universities in the U. S., where student activists complained that professors were not treating their fears about potentially offensive Halloween costumes seriously enough. (Yes, really.) You can see the clip on YouTube, and it makes for truly extraordinary viewing.
Surrounded by activists, a professor begs them to consider their common humanity and to listen to contrary opinions. At that, one of the students, apparently in tears, shrieks: 'But we're dying!'As Professor Rife writes, it is barely believable that a student at one of the world's top universities could consider herself oppressed, let alone that she could claim to be 'dying'.
In his words, 'the idea that a simple email about Halloween costumes could constitute an existential threat is nothing short of delusional.'
Alas, the delusion is spreading.
Take the students at the University of East Anglia who took offence at what they saw as 'cultural appropriation' — or the act of using things from another culture — because a local Mexican restaurant handed out Sombreros.
Or the student activists at Sussex, who asked their fellows to stop using the pronouns 'he' and 'she' because they make 'assumptions about identity'.
A collective mania seems to have seized Britain's campuses.What makes this so toxic is that campuses often set the tone for mainstream society, since it is our universities that produce the leaders of the future.
You can bet the youthful prigs and censors of today will be the Labour MPs and BBC executives of tomorrow, endlessly hectoring the rest of us about the importance of safe spaces and making sure that every prime-time TV show has a transgender character.
The irony, of course, is that there are lots of good causes that students could be marching about.
They could be protesting about environmental damage in the Amazon, jihadi violence in Syria, the treatment of refugees in Eastern Europe, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, genocide in Yemen, the death of democracy in Venezuela, the nuclear threat in North Korea — the list goes on.
But no. The precious little flowers much prefer talking about themselves and the terrible hardships they have had to endure.
Revealingly, however, there is one group of students who never get involved in this sort of thing.
These are the thousands of youngsters who have come to study in Britain from much poorer, less privileged countries than our own.
Many of them might well be tempted to see themselves as victims, since they often come from battle-scarred, war-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq. But they almost never do.
Precisely because they are so conscious of their good fortune, they usually work extremely hard, putting their British colleagues to shame.
So while our own students are shouting about micro-aggressions and trigger warnings, and wallowing in their supposed oppression by their callously unfeeling tutors, their foreign counterparts are quietly working in the library, getting the qualifications they need to lift themselves out of poverty and lead their countries towards prosperity.
The ideal thing, of course, would be for our own students to 'man up'. Alas, even those words are enough to lead to all sorts of feminist weeping and wailing in the halls of academe.
And that, of course, tells its own story.
Reader Comments
"The students of the Sixties never saw themselves as victims.
Quite the reverse, in fact: they knew they were privileged, often felt guilty about it, and were fired with an idealistic determination to help others less fortunate than themselves.
But today's students, despite their predominantly middle-class backgrounds, have been encouraged to see themselves as the suffering casualties of a cruel world.
Instead of recognising their own privilege, they see themselves as victims of oppression, which is why so many of them flocked to Jeremy Corbyn, who shamelessly panders to their sense of entitlement. "
That's why they call it the daily fail media.
The baby boomers were able to go to college without huge debt. They had a promising job market to enter afterwards. The media wasn't totally corrupted by corporations. There were no fascist laws and police state mentality to deal with.
And then you take a jab at corbyn, nice clue to show that you're pushing the agenda that blames the people and ignores the huge issues in the system.
This article nails it dead center ;
'Weak' parents are raising a generation of 'prince boofhead' boys ABC News Breakfast [Link]
Whilst the article focuses on Boys, the same can be said for girls as well.
Never before has the old saying, "TOUGHEN UP PRINCESS" been more valid then today.
This lot thinks jabbering on social media is activism. Barking at someone on campus. Rubbish the lot. All this is smoke and no fire. No real throw weight. Have your lazy self a nice tantrum and them head off shoe shopping.
Just flat out ignoring this lumpen-activist bunch is good and go get on with serious work with better people. Otherwise - fry their circuits. Tell them to sod off big time. Tell them they are not welcome where real work is being done. That they are classic liberals - hypocrits.
Enemies of the working class, agents of decipt and the ruling class. Bloody well go after them as a lesson for training and sharpening healthy forces. But exclude and quarantine.
Above, one, or more, has/have commented about these kids being a first generation raised with societally-instilled concepts inconsistent with the whole basic concept of individual responsibility, the long gone open-minded concepts behind a liberal education, the US Constitution, the DOI, and the BOR.
A huge percentage of these children were raised by parents who were/are ‘dependent' on government handouts, and so I think we are witnessing a second or third generation of kids who were raised by ‘programmed dumbsh*ts’ who claimed and still claim that because they were not rich, and their lives were not like what they saw on the TV, that the world ‘owed’ them… and big.
This is not an accident; it is part of the bigger plan of the whole “N.W.O.” (to quote President. Bush*t #1). In order to have a global government from the top down, you first need to take down (in steps/over time) the country with the best constitution and rights of individuals. The first big step that way in my adult life was ‘our’ great war on drugs, which meant and means a war against individualists.
Then bring in as many people as possible to whom ‘freedom’ means the ability to go to the grocery store and not have to pay off/bribe some state employee, (e.g., a cop). The approach by the Western countries is to import into their country as many of these folks as possible. Taken to its logical conclusion, it seems that the US’s immigration policy’s aim is to get America to where we are equal with the median country of the world in every demographic ever considered: the most typical worldwide median income and an ever greater disparity of wealth, i.e., a nonexistent middle class eaten apart by immigration and taxes.
I was 13 when I first rhetorically asked whether there should ever come a point that America says “Sorry, but we’re all filled up?” or do we wait until our population density is akin to Singapore’s? As I also noted then, America’s immigration program seemed to have as its aim, to import as many people as possible from as many different places as possible, and then encourage them to not assimilate. Instead of a 'melting pot' 'our' 'Government' has purposefully created at big conflict pot just waiting to over boil over, and bring into use all of those militarized police and those thankfully still empty FEMA prisons built on a no-bid contract by D. Cheney’s Halliburton.
That is how a nation is destroyed; we used to learn about some of this in school, but not for decades has such occurred. The government demands to ‘protect people’ from the government’s own false flags; it DEMANDS THAT citizens start asking for more governmental and societal control of individuals / bigger government; and even when the false flags are so obvious that the people who pull them off are immunized to the evil they do.
Think of all of those ‘terror’ cases busted by the FBI where they created the whole plot etc. themselves. Each of those is a mini false flag. And so we have idiots raised by idiots who, by merely breathing are magically entitled to vote YES MORE GOVERNMENT; MORE SECURITY, LESS FREEDOM!
Is there any remaining country where an individual’s ‘right to be left alone’ still exists, as it did in my youth from the 1960’s through the 80’s?
R.C.
I know, that my parenting responsibilities have been taken away from me, by my Government. I have very little input to my child's schooling, shut out would be a better word. When I try to intervene, protest at some issue, I'm considered a trouble maker, yet my oldest child was allowed to pass from grade one to grade six, despite the fact he couldnt read worth squat. When I complained, I was fobbed off, so I went to the Top of the organisation only to discover the person I was speaking to was friends with the headmaster who was fobbing me off. I was told he would never do that, so I then asked, why has my son not been taught to read then, as the school is OBLIGATED to teach him, and have thus far FAILED IN THEIR DUTIES ???
To cut a long story short, arrangements were made to ensure he could read, as were ELEVEN other kids in his class. I was the ONLY parent to complain about the failure of the education system to fulfill their charter and teach our kids.
I also came up against this system when my daughter started high school, they were obligated to choose a career path during their school years and only study the subjects relevant for that career path. They were given NO OPTIONS.
Yet the FACT, that such jobs they were training for, may not be available when they left school, and had targeted their schooling for, would not be available for them, so what was the point of them targeting their lessons for a career path that would probably not be available when the graduated ????
We also see the intrusion of immunisation. once upon a time it was voluntary, nowadays, strangely, it's become ENFORCEABLE. Where is the free will here ????
I could go on and on, how the Government is slowly strangling out right to free choice, to live our lives as we choose, if you cant see that happening around you, it's no surprise that children are turning out the way they are, very nicely according to the plan.
I know several healthy-minded young adults. Their parents brought them up wholly outside the education system which, like the government and the media, were and still are the main target&outlet of the cultural marxists and their noxious policies of political correctness, sexualization of youth and identity politics.
It's easy to turn young ones into melting snowflakes - just let the state fill their heads&hearts with force-fed school, university and media curricula. Not to mention the detrimental effects of the ever-increasing use of day-. pre- and after-school "care" coz both parents both need to work to make ends meet.
Is it time to look beyond blaming parents to the dangerous creep created by anglo-zionists? [Link]
Parents dont know what a healthy lifestyle is. Look around at all the unhealthy bodies limping around our streets!!!!!
I high5 RC's comments as well. Long but Savy, thatz our RC
I've never met the young parent with enough time to be a "helicopter" simply because the challenges involved with staying above water and keeping everybody fed also kept them perpetually worn out. (Though TV and video games and tablets and such are always there to babysit; all but the most stalwart succumb to the temptation. -You hit the TV remote 'on' switch and the kids stop wailing. It's like (dark) magic; parents paying for peace with a little bit of their child's brain tissue).
I think part of the problem is also the necessity of having both parents out of the house working to stay solvent, so you end up with kids under state care or TV care, -along with drugs and estrogen laden foods messing up hormone balances.
Add to all of that, as you say, cell phone radiation turning minds to mush. (Seeing babies with iPads is truly horrifying.) Blaming parents for snowflakery is shortsighted, I think.
----
Also... The other big point in my posting today: I wanted to apologize for being a complete dick to you some years ago. Whether you remember or not, I felt I treated you very unfairly and have felt crappy about it since. Sorry.
You've become a very impressive voice out here. You should join the forum. I think you'd find and be a benefit there.
Well thanks for the apology, but you can spare the tree, there was no need. Water off a duck's back.
Disagreements are part of life - and that is another snowflake issue - a lot of them are unable to get their heads around the concept of 'disagreement'. Weird!
Add to all of that, as you say, cell phone radiation turning minds to mush. (Seeing babies with iPads is truly horrifying.) Blaming parents for snowflakery is shortsighted, I think.
Parents are to one degree or another NNEMF snowflakes themselves, but younger folk are more so, 'cause they've been moulded by it from infancy. God knows what the day after the day after tomorrow is going to look like, and I've just been having that conversation on the Jack Kruse forum.
You've become a very impressive voice out here.
That's kind. Thanks.
You should join the forum.
There's more elbow room out here. It suits me better. Probably suits everyone else better too. LOL.
Resistance is futile!
Never before has society been exposed to so much conditioning as we are today, very few people, really make any indepth INDEPENDENT decision nowadays.
You need only look at the MSM, and the FALSE NEWS they constantly spew out from the talking heads, and Government representatives making all sorts of wild accusations and claims against countries, and their Governing Individuals, the masses, (the parents we are talking about on here ) swallow this bullshit without question, consider it all authentic, and truthfull, NEVER, EVER asking for proof to be supplied to verify the claims being made.
Then on such information, (which is a lie, or inaccurate) they make a decision to either support the talking heads or not. In the majority of cases, they support these claims and even repeat them, themselves when discussing the issue with friends or co workers, thus adding to the misinformation program.
The whole time, being totaly ignorant they are being manipulated.
That is the World we are living in today, wake up to it, develop a strategy to survive with it, or go under.
They are never going to be worth a plug nickle ... they have NO intention of "growing up and working".. WERK.... OH NO! That is a four letter word... that is worse than the "N" word!!!!!
As long as suckers PAY to be abused, dishonored, and USED by crass creatures.. including the US government... it will continue apace!
Society, it is to blame...and it is. The parents are slack, because so many single parents, or 'kind of in a relationship' parents, are distracted by a bit of freedom that being in a marriage type situation does not offer. Because women have said, quite bluntly, I made my bed and now I'm vacating, instead of, I made my bed and I have to lie in it. There's a realisation that without BOTH genders, family life really does not work...hmmm, who to blame? Not the kids, who mostly have been in situations whereby both parents over-compensate for the loss of a family life. Who's self esteem is pretty low ,because kids compute things differently? Who'd be a kid now, eh? But they are millennials, so it's their fault...not bleedin' likely...