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.
Comment: Yes, and at the voting booths. The election of Donald Trump is the cumulative effect of masses of Americans coming to learn what the Weavers learned early on; that the USA is "irredeemably corrupt."