Political correctness: Debate over whether it has gone too far rages at universities from Cambridge to Yale

To most people, it might seem innocuous enough: an email from a lecturer at Yale University suggesting that her students should try not to be offended if they saw one of their peers wearing a culturally insensitive Halloween costume. “Is there no room any more for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” she asked.

But the message from Erika Christakis, which had been designed to pacify rather than enrage, blew up in her face. She and her husband Nicholas, who are masters at Yale’s Silliman College and live among the students, are now facing calls to resign from their positions, move out of their home and leave the university for good. Some students have even threatened to leave the college if they refuse.

Several American commentators have expressed their bewilderment at how an apparently mild email encouraging students to think, debate and not to overreact could be enough to provoke a hate mob. The incident has reignited the debate over whether today’s students are being “coddled” and universities turned into places where they are constantly shielded from words and ideas that might make them uncomfortable.

open image in gallery

It is not a debate confined to the United States. In the UK similar concerns were raised last month, when Germaine Greer was forced to pull out of a lecture at Cardiff University after students launched a petition accusing her of holding “misogynistic views” towards trans women and calling on her to be barred from speaking.

Over the summer, students at the University of Oxford’s Oriel College called for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the South African territory of Rhodesia. The group claimed it was a monument to racism and colonialism, with one member telling reporters: “There’s a violence to having to walk past the statue every day on the way to your lectures.”

In the US, students have also requested that so-called “trigger warnings” be included on the front covers of classic works of literature, in case people who have had distressing experiences of sexual violence, racism or other traumas are caught off-guard and find themselves reliving the past.

Books named by American students at various universities as potentially requiring trigger warnings were said to include Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In the UK, the idea has been dismissed by lecturers and academics including John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, who said last year: “You might as well put a label on English literature saying: ‘Warning – bad stuff happens here’.”

This apparent rise in the general stifling of debate on American campuses – and the danger that the phenomenon poses to the future of the students passing through today’s universities – was recently discussed at length in an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It is entitled: “The Coddling of the American Mind”.

Arguing that the modern rush to take offence should be described as “vindictive protectiveness” and should not be confused with the hackneyed phrase “political correctness”, the authors say it is creating a culture in which “everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse”.

They continue: “What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities?”

The fear of offence is felt keenly by the people who run universities, as the incident involving Ms Christakis at Yale shows. Her email was written in response to a campus-wide message circulated by the university’s Intercultural Affairs Committee which urged students planning on dressing up for Halloween to do so sensitively. The email, signed off by no fewer than 13 Yale administrative staff, told students to ask themselves a series of questions before donning their costume. They included: “Is the humour based on ‘making fun’ of real people, human traits or cultures? Does it further misinformation or historical and cultural inaccuracies? Does this costume mock or belittle someone’s deeply held faith tradition?”

Ironically, some students at Yale objected that this initial email had been too heavy-handed, provoking Ms Christakis’s contribution and the furore that followed. In today’s universities, it seems, it is increasingly difficult to please anyone.

The debate around the “new political correctness” on university campuses in the US and the UK involves many terms that may be unfamiliar to readers. Here are some of the buzzwords used by those on both sides of the argument:

Safe spaces

Places intended to be free from discrimination, harassment and hate speech against any underprivileged groups, such as women, LGBT people and ethnic minorities. A protected area where the usual discrimination and prejudices that these groups might encounter in everyday life doesn’t exist. People can be removed from the “safe space” if their disagreeable views threaten this.

Trigger warnings

Sometimes called “content notes”, a warning at the top of an article or front of a book that lets people know of distressing content such as rape, violence or racism.

Microaggressions

Minor slights or snubs that are usually unintended but can be perceived by the recipient as evidence of underlying prejudicial assumptions. For example, asking an Asian student why he “isn’t good at maths”.

No-platforming

Refusing to give a platform to speakers or writers who have previously espoused controversial views – for instance, refusing to let a prominent feminist who doesn’t accept that transgender women are women speak at a university.

Vindictive protectiveness

A term used by critics of “the new political correctness” to describe the behaviour of censorious students. They argue that through excessive molly-coddling, the creation of false spaces which don’t represent the complexities of the world, and the establishment of environments where anyone who disagrees with the majority view is silenced, young people are failing to build resilience and actually end up damaging their own mental health.

Catastrophising

Believing in the worst-case scenario as a result of trauma in the past – for instance, a person who has experienced domestic violence might believe that when they make a very minor mistake at work, their boss will fire them. Free speech campaigners have accused some students who take offence at microaggressions of catastrophising.

Intersectionality

The idea that all prejudices intersect, rather than stand on their own. For instance, to examine a person’s experience of discrimination in society, we shouldn’t just focus on the fact that they are black, but also that they are female and working class.

Cisgender

A person whose gender and biological sex align; someone who is not transgender.

Holly Baxter