Stepford students

I’ll put my hands up and admit it: I’m one of the nasties you’ve read about – a Stepford student. I was one of the original group of stony-eyed students who, our ‘brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform’, conspired to set up a new publication to promote our ‘groupthink’ philosophy. The Stepford Student was founded to tackle the picture that Brendan O’Neill painted of us in this magazine in two ways. We wanted to show that young lefties aren’t dogged by a perpetual earnestness, and do actually possess a sense of humour and an ability to laugh things off, and we wanted to bring our arguments to

Free speech isn’t what it used to be. From safe spaces to trigger warnings, university campuses have been hit particularly hard by today’s trend for increased censorship. Now these Stepford students have a new target in their sights: free speech societies. A student at the London School of Economics has submitted a motion to ban the university’s free-speech society. While the LSESU Free Speech Society was set up in protest of the Student Union ‘banning individual opinions’, they have now come under fire for not ‘liking a perceived focus on women and minorities’. Writing for the student paper, a student by the name of Maurice Banerjee Palmer says he filed the motion

At No 5 in the Spectator’s most-read articles for 2015 is Brendan O’Neill’s cover piece describing ‘Stepford Students’: those who want to shut down debate when it involves people they disagree with and arguments they don’t like. Brendan spotted this phenomenon in 2014 but his article returned to our best-read list this year as more and more people cottoned on to the trend for ‘safe spaces’ and no-platforming in our universities. And it spawned a website edited by defiant Stepford Students. Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’. That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’. In these people’s minds, in which the Offence-Seeking Antenna is forever turned to High, a

The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might – you guessed it – ’cause offence’. No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group – the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators – which aspires to ‘welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion’.

Do today’s students care about free speech? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown from the University of Oxford debate this week’s cover feature on the ‘Stepford Students’ and the rise of group think among undergraduates. Brendan and Harriet discuss the Oxford Students for Life debate cancelled this week, following a student backlash. James Forsyth and Alex Massie also look at Scotland’s new First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the significance of her ascension to leader of the SNP. Many unionists had hoped and predicted he party would collapse after a ‘No’ vote for independence. Sturgeon appears to have proved them wrong. And Michael Lind looks at the similarities