Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics at Kent University, has written a terrific piece for UnHerd about the HEPI poll of university students that I wrote about in the Spectator this week. After documenting the lurch towards intolerance in British universities – as evidenced by the poll – Goodwin offers a three-part explanation for why this has happened.
First, it reflects a shift in attitudes between generations arising from their different coming-of-age experiences.
Millennials and Gen-Xers came-of-age in the Eighties and the Nineties, sandwiched between Thatcher and Blair. Politics was turbulent but also more stable. People were generally committed to the two main parties. The agenda was more economic than cultural. And there was still a diverse range of voices in politics, media, creative, and cultural institutions, which helped to ensure that people were exposed to alternative views. The growing education-based polarisation between graduates and non-graduates had not yet intensified. And the far more liberal graduate class had not yet taken over the institutions.
Zoomers, in sharp contrast, have grown up in a completely different world. They were 13 when the Trump and Brexit revolts erupted and they spent their adolescence living amid what political scientists call “affective polarisation” — a far more divisive, volatile, and emotion-led politics in which Remainers and Leavers, liberals and conservatives, have simultaneously became more positive about their own tribe and more openly hostile toward the opposing side.
Aside from being the first generation to witness a strong populist Right (UKIP) and a strong populist Left (Corbyn), they have been raised by parents who have more openly taken sides in this more polarised environment — symbolised by the 36% of Remain-voting parents who would “feel upset” if their child married a Brexiteer, and the 21% of Brexit-voting parents who would feel similarly if their child were to marry a Remainer.
Given this polarisation is underpinned by the growing educational divide between more culturally liberal graduates and more conservative non-graduates, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that the university students who are self-selecting into universities have also become more focused on prioritising the needs of their own tribe and more willing to ostracise others.
Second, Zoomers are the first generation to be immersed in what the sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call the Culture of Victimhood.
Unlike moral cultures in the past, which stressed dignity and honour, and put an emphasis on toleration and negotiation as a route out of conflict, victimhood culture encourages students to stress their oppression, marginalisation, and victimhood as a means of acquiring status from their peers; while simultaneously turning to third parties (i.e., university administrators) to punish those who are seen to be “oppressing” or merely challenging their safety and beliefs.
This is reflected in the finding this week that 64% of students now think that universities should “consult special interest groups (i.e. religious or gender societies) about on-campus events”, up from only 40% in 2016. And in the finding that 61% of students now think that main job of the university is to ensure that all students are protected from discrimination rather than allow unlimited free speech, up from only 37% in 2016.
The rise of this victimhood culture is also, almost certainly, being encouraged by the broader ideological evolution of Britain’s universities. As my research, and that of others, has shown over the past four years, these are morphing into “ideological monocultures” where the ratio of Left-wing to Right-wing academics has increased from three to one in the Sixties to around eight to one today. Much like institutions in America, it is increasingly hard to find visible conservatives or other nonconformists on campus. Some students will now go through their entire degree never really knowing one at all.
One basic problem with monocultures is they embolden the most radical activists to lash out against others, safe in the knowledge that the moderates won’t challenge them. In turn, significant numbers of academics openly admit to being biased against conservatives, including one in three who would not hire a known Brexit supporter. Most conservative and gender critical scholars say they are self-censoring on campus, as do one-quarter of all university students, while those on the right or who do not subscribe to the new orthodoxy on campus are especially likely to do so, underlining the impact of this new moral culture.
Nor is this lost on students themselves. While prominent academics sit on Twitter arguing that the crisis unfolding in our universities represents a moral panic being whipped up by Right-wing campaigners, the students who are actually sitting in their seminars and lectures are increasingly taking the opposite view — the latest report finds that 38% of students think “universities are becoming less tolerant of a wide range of viewpoints”, up from 24% in 2016.
Third, organisational changes in universities have meant students-as-customers have become more empowered, with ‘student satisfaction’ being the all-important metric by which universities judge themselves.
Conservatives are as much to blame as the Left. By focusing relentlessly on the marketisation of universities, by talking about students as consumers, we have created a climate in which the demands of students, not academics, increasingly shape our intellectual culture. Almost all the changes that are being imposed on higher education for largely political reasons — the decolonisation of reading lists, the imposition of ideological litmus tests such as “diversity statements” when applying for jobs or grants, decisions regarding who speaks and works on campus and who does not, and the transformation of universities more generally into hyper-political organisations — are now often made in the name of “student satisfaction”. This is further encouraged by the rampant spread of university bureaucracy, in which cowardly administrators — none of whom really understand the point of academe — routinely bend over backwards to ensure that student-led demands to have events removed, academics investigated, and new restrictive policies implemented are fully met and satisfied.
This is a really excellent analysis by Professor Goodwin (a member of the Free Speech Union’s Advisory Council) and very much worth reading in full.
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Wasn’t moderna 3x the dose?!?
It’s high time people were arrested.
The reports are beginning to penetrate the mainstream, and they won’t stop coming. There have been too many victims.
yes, 100mcg vs 30mcg for Pfizer.
Two years too late – Fauci is obviously under the “protection” of “powerful friends” and Johnson always has Carrie as his alibi !
Has Whitty got a new job to go with his Knighthood for “Services Rendered”?
Whitty will probably end up at the WHO – he’s always been a Billy Gates man.
How much longer can these f*****s pushing the jab keep their heads up their arses? Time to take some action against anybody saying they are ‘safe and effective.’ Safe and effective, my arse.
The City of Wolverhampton Council says: “The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective and approved. It gives you the best protection against the virus and is saving lives.”
Corona ad seem to be gone from Reading. At least, I don’t remember seeing one for the last couple of days.
Obviously a Council subjected to ‘Virologist Entryism’!
They’re just functionaries repeating ad nauseam what the official Government policy is. There will have been close to zero due diligence done in any local councils on Covid.
The jab kills….. who knew
What I meant was ‘WHO knew’
It doesn’t seem to kill young people very well – Billy Gates must be riling at the inefficiency of his first eugenics exercise!
I’m beginning to get the feeling from reading the latest posts, that we are starting to go around in circles. I always believed that covid-19 was plucked out of thin air, the only ingredients being timing, location, a convenient test and a mRNA vaccine. Everything thereafter relied entirely on governments around the world panicking. Well here we are 2+ years on, a frightened, enfeebled and medicated nation of the compliant, present company excepted. Someone else can finish off
Well here we are 2+ years on, a frightened, enfeebled and medicated world of the compliant, present company excepted.
FTFY
I am far more cynical than you. I am of the belief that the PTB know full well that each ‘crisis’ they create will be exposed as fraud fairly quickly, so they have a long list for ‘bait and switch’ purposes. War in Ukraine, inflation, climate heating, food scare, they’ve got them lined up one after another. I’ve seen through every single one of them already, but most people haven’t. They’re too busy paying for the mortgage and getting their children to sports practice and the like….
The tin foil hat wearer in me has wondered for some time whether the script will ultimately be flipped on these vaccines. There seems to be a concerted effort to sink the West. What better way to do that than to inject ~80% of the population with a toxic substance and then gradually reveal the harm. Think of the lawsuits. Lockdowns, vaccines and Russia sanctions have one thing in common – financial self-immolation. I wonder why.
A part of me thinks the whole Shanghai narrative is to give the West one last push towards mRNA. I heard people saying the reason China was in such a bad way was because they had inferior non mRNA vaccines.
There’s a concerted effort (actually, rather a distributed effort) of every clown with a chip on his shoulder to frame some debate as Either my way or the apocalypse.
There was a report from NZ saying just that. The person writing the article had spoken to a member of the “elite” who revealed to them that the plan was for the population of the west to overthrow their governments once they realised what had been done to them. Then one world government would take over.
Sorry link lost.
I can’t actually see riots or wars speeding up moves towards world government. It’s during the relative peace of the past 30 years that it’s made particularly rapid progress. See the 2018 book ‘Giants: the Global Power Elite’ by Prof. Peter Phillips.
I also highly recommend James Kunstler’s 2020 book ‘Living in the Long Emergency’. It’s the sequel to his 2005 book ‘The Long Emergency’. It went to press late 2019 so by coincidence it excludes COVID. This is useful, because you can see how the world post-peak oil faced enormous financial / economic problems and how COVID fitted in as a convenient story. to hide what was really being done, i.e. organising a reset of the currency.
I can’t see them doing that, isn’t it more likely they want digital control so we can’t overthrow them.
I don’t know, the globalists don’t want national governments. A tsunami of litigation and near-civil war could easily lead to outside (globalist UN) intervention being ‘needed’.
If 5 million people march on Westminster with the sole intention of murdering 500 MPs, digital control won’t stop them.
It’s nothing to do with China. The rich of the West have their money invested safely all over the place, far away from ‘Western’ nations. They buy land in South America, the Caribbean, Europe (if they are American). They will have their futures safeguarded even if there is war and revolution in the lower 48. They’ve never been patriots, they just use patriotism to keep the people dupable. The European ‘elites’ are just the same.
We need our MPs to make EUAs illegal.
Giving pharmaceutical companies immunity from prosecution during a rushed rollout of novel drugs should have been a red flag to anyone – certainly to our MPs.
Only if they had a modicum of integrity and intellect.
Sadly, they have neither.
Democracy red in tooth and claw. Lol.
Especially when there’s fraud!
It has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy against public health!
The. Ministry of Truth deals in propaganda.
The Ministry of Love deals in torture.
The Ministry of Plenty deals in shortages.
The Ministry of Public Health deals in…
The Ministry of Public Health deals in unprotected sex with syphilis sufferers….
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while; an interview with the US’s most cancelled man:
Exclusive Interview: Robert Kennedy Jr. Destroys Big Pharma, Fauci & Pro-Vaccine Movement — Yandex video search
Actually, EUAs used properly are an essential part of a proper response to disease crises. The problem is not an EUA per se, it is the entirely corrupt, dysfunctional, criminal classes in the pharmaceutical industry, in the money world, in Westminster and the media that makes it problematic.
But let’s be clear: if I had been PM, with a PhD and seven years virological postdoctoral experience, allied to working in the commerical biopharma space for a while, had prevented EUAs for Covid vaccines, if I had allowed controlled trialling of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide etc etc, you can be sure that I would have been bumped off by Gates et al.
What we need is to kick Gates, Soros and all their organisations out of the UK, out of Europe, out of everywhere. We need to withdraw all recognition of the WHO so long as Gates is an investor. We will not allow Gates to have any contact with the Department of Health, nor will he have any influence on UK health policy. Cambridge University and all other UK universities will be told that accepting Gates money is incompatible with receiving a single penny of UK public money and that the Gates Scholarship programme must be thrown out due to the evil of its benefactor.
Pfizer’s exclusivity deal with Israel probably doesn’t seem like such great idea to their shareholders after all in hindsight. But thank you, Pfizer, for allowing us to pinpoint exactly how much harm YOUR product caused in YOUR own ‘personal lab.’
What’s important is we realise the Everdemic is not over, never will be, and we should get our fourth dose – and schedule the fifth – and particularly get the young doses up as it’s the best way to protect them.
On what scientific basis can you say that.
I’m hoping that this is sarcasm.
If I were working in the Cabinet Office I would be writing:
“Nothing to see here – move along. Oh. look! There’s a squirrel…”
and then going out to buy booze for the next party…
That is exactly what the Government , the Judiciary, the MHRA , 80 % of MPs and the Police have been doinhg for two years – isn’t this just a bit suspicious?
If you were working in the Cabinet office, you would have to put up with Mark Sedwill coming to poke his oar in, thinking that the current incumbent must fall into line with his MI6 and Goldman Sachs schemata…
just reading about Troponins. A way to test for heart stress. Apparently jabs increased levels by insane multiples. Just to put it into context, a normal level of troponin in the body is <0.05. 1-4 is heart attack risk. Jab takes level to 35
The law of unintended (or intended) consequences!
I remember Hugh Pym (PPE Oxford), the BBC’s ‘health editor’ saying on the today programme after Novak Djokovic’s interview, “What more evidence does he want?”. Perhaps, Hugh should be sent this and asked to reconsider his question.
What more evidence do we want to demand that Hugh Pym be sacked without a reference?
Next door neighbour. Found dead from heart attack a week back. 60ish, a bit overweight but normal for his age.
Husband of Covidian acquiantance. Died in his sleep. Heart attack. c45, a bit overweight but normal for his age.
One of my best friends. c 45. Pericarditis after being boosted. In hospital for a week. Better now.
Many people (most) rationalise these events as things that ‘just happens to men of a certain age’. What they are overlooking is that these are sufficiently rare such that if a factor comes along that causes more of these events, then the likelihood that it was the cause is very high. So yes, I’m happy saying that it was the vaxx that did it (most likely).
Out of the blue today my daughter said something along the lines of ‘I want to go and get my vaccine in ABC town. Becky at school said that they give out biscuits once you’ve had it’. This was only about 15 minutes after I found out about one of these events so I almost blew my top.
I don’t think overweight people do get more heart attacks. Dr Malcolm Kendrick has looked into this. There’s a phenomenan called the obesity paradox. People who are naturally thin can also suffer diabetes and cardiovascular problems.
You get tea and biscuits after you donate blood. That’s a more socially useful activity.
Shops also SELL biscuits.
The cardio vascular damage of a single packet of high fructose biscuits will be less than a jab though.
https://realclimatescience.com/2022/04/twitter-doubling-down-on-their-evil/
See what happens when you put things like this on twitter
I just had to visit an acquaintance of a friend, to collect something he had spare and was giving away. The first thing he said as I entered the house was: ‘You’re OK, we’re all vaccinated’. I said something to the effect that I couldn’t care less about COVID. My only worry was his two large dogs which were jumping madly up and down.
He gradually got the message that I wasn’t that keen on dogs but seemed to think I was
1 irrational to be worried about dogs almost the size of a human
2 irrational not to be worried about COVID.
Had the dogs been vaccinated though?
Did anyone notice when they mentioned Hancock flooding care homes with asymptomatic patents they are perpetuating the asymptomatic myth.
Has it turned out to be a myth? Have you got a good link for that, please?
You don’t need a link. You know it. Can you give someone a cold when you don’t have a cold?
In Lala Covid Lieland anything is possible – except the vax protecting you from the virus.
It has never been demonstrated to exist since Whitty invented it . Or do you have evidence to the contrary?
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/a-few-new-papers-are-brewing?s=r
Jessica Rose on the sudden death category in VAERS.
Safe to say, sudden death is happening and being reported at rates higher than ever before (big surprise) as per VAERS, and although it is being reported for individuals ages 50+ with more prevalence, it is not limited to a specific age group.
Check out the graph for the percentage of cases of sudden death by the days post vaccine. phew!
“Killer Jab”? Exactly how much more evidence is needed?
Front page news? BBC lead story ? No …pushed aside .
Evil stalks the Land of Lies !
its Also very weird how hepatitis is mysteriously on the rise among youngsters.
Israel should remember that that one resurrection on their turf has an asterisk beside it.
So there were fifty excess deaths in 3 months in a population of 3-4 million (depending how the demographics of a population of 8.9m people works out)?
It does seem a bit of a waste of money to spend multiple millions vaccinating a healthy population just to kill 50 of them. It’s no good health-wise and pretty useless as a eugenics exercise too!
Why not just spend the money handing out free condoms instead?!
It’s where the money goes that’s the point. Pfizer etc
Oh it is much worse than this. Simply read the 1,250,000 adverse event reports in the USA and 22,000 deaths post vaxx cdc VAERS reports. Adverse events range from transverse myelitis, thrombocytopenia, strokes, atrial fibrillation,heart attacks, Bell’s palsy, guillian barre, reactivation of dormant viruses such as shingles, serious lung infections, blindness, tinnitus, serious skin eruptions, miscarriages, abnormal menstrual bleeding, reoccurrence of cancers, including pancreatic, ovarian, lung, breast, unsteadiness, vertigo and many more. Did you know Pfizer just released in their data dump, six pages of adverse events from their trial data. More people died in the trial arm than the control group. If you took these vaccines, you should be concerned.