Why dismiss a Catholic priest for being Catholic?

They’re just kids! What’s your problem? This has become the default reaction of a whole raft of clever people to anyone who gets hot under the collar about the fashion for students banning things in universities: speakers, ideas, books. It was ever this way, they say, and besides, sometimes the kids are right.

The little episode of righteous vandalism at Manchester last week was a case in point. Students painted over a mural of Kipling’s ‘If’ in the newly renovated union building, on the grounds that he ‘dehumanised people of colour’. Kipling was a racist, they insisted, a man of Empire. Out came the whitewash and on top of it went ‘Still I Rise’ by the American civil-rights activist Maya Angelou. Newspaper columnists raged. Civilised people said, sotto voce: well, what harm was done? Calm down, dear. Don’t take children so seriously.

It’s an enticing thought. But I’m not sure we can rest easy just yet. The trouble with the ‘just kids’ approach is that the real threat to free speech comes not from the uppity young, so much as the adults who hide behind them.

‘Just kids’ implies a happy disregard for the posturing of teens, especially student politicians (dread breed). But it’s precisely because the adults running universities don’t have a ‘just kids’ attitude that nonsense like the Kipling affair makes the news. Manchester uni didn’t scold the students for defacing property, or explain Kipling in context; they didn’t suggest that since the student union building itself is named after Steve Biko, it might be a pleasing show of real diversity to let Kipling sit alongside him. They simply allowed the student union to apologise that the poem had been there at all.

It’s worse than that.