Trigger warnings are out of control at the University of Essex
You don’t need a PhD to see that censorship thrives in universities. In the past few weeks alone, a professor has been banned from the University of Manchester and described as a ‘potential risk to colleagues’ for having allegedly used ‘the n-word’ in a disciplinary meeting; a sociology lecturer at Abertay University has been subjected to a smear campaign for inviting a speaker critical of Scotland’s rape laws; and pro-Palestinian student activists at City, University of London have called for the dismissal of a Jewish professor because he completed compulsory military service in Israel during the 1980s.
You don’t need a degree of any kind to see that universities need more free speech, not less; and that students need encouragement to tolerate and challenge ideas they dislike, rather than having their censorious impulses validated. But this is exactly what is happening at the University of Essex. Professors at this august institution have placed trigger warnings on essays discussing free speech. Truly, academia is where irony goes to die.
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