Libertarian students are fighting back against ‘oppressive’ campus politics with snacks and beverages

It sounds like a Beano cartoon, but it’s real. Students for Liberty in Canada, part of a global network of libertarian students, have joined forces with a website called Nanny State to promote a new range of snacks, launching tomorrow. Included in the range is: "Pop", "The chocolate bar", and "junk food", and the satirical labels warn you: “chocolate seriously increases your risk of obesity" and "chocolate may kill you".

Just in case anyone should miss the irony, they are not actually in favour of a nanny state. Instead the group, studentsforliberty.org, is organising conferences on anarchy, with such topics as: “South Park and Public Choice” and other controversial topics. I guess even libertarians have the right to band together and be a ".org" if they feel like it. And host learned conferences. I might even want to enrol as a member of the Anarchists Club, if they’ll have me. I imagine it will be rather like the Solitary Existentialists Party or the Category of Things That Do Not Belong in any Category.

They have a strong argument: indisputably, over the last few decades, campus politics in America and beyond has become stifling and oppressive to the point of easily caricatured absurdity. Jerry Seinfeld recently said that he doesn’t like to do stand-up on campus any more because students, rather than laughing at his jokes, have a tendency to reprimand him for being sexist, racist, or fascist, or all of the above.

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My New York friend Laura Kipnis, who is a professor of communications at Northwestern University, and author of the witty and provocative books, Against Love and Men, got nothing but flak when she published, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, protesting against over-protectiveness towards students and the rise of the hyper-sensitive Generation Snowflake.

I salute the more permissive, rock ’n’ roll, anything-goes mentality espoused by Students for Liberty. As Philip Larkin said: "Sexual intercourse began/ in nineteen sixty-three...Between the end of the [Lady] Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles' first LP)". A decade or two later it was properly bottled back up again and slapped with a warning label: “offensive”. Frustrated, I wrote a piece complaining about the New Puritanism which promptly aroused the wrath of New Puritans.

Once, at university, I was trying to organise a football team and I pinned up a notice in the Senior Common Room seeking “right-wingers, left-wingers, and libertarians”. It was the last word that set people off. The word “liberty” is increasingly frowned upon. It worked well in the French Revolution, but now it’s mainly used as a label by American presidents and British prime ministers to plaster over the top of something originally called Stupid and Destructive Foreign Policy.

Isaiah Berlin in his classic essay: “Two Concepts of Liberty” distinguished between “freedom from”, hostile to overly intrusive government, and therefore a good thing; and “freedom to”, coming out of Rousseau and ending up with totalitarianism, and therefore bad. But he used to teach at Oxford. Maybe he wanted to be free from teaching, but he probably also wanted to be free to pursue research, for example. And I bet even his most loyal students would not have appreciated freedom from graduation, freedom from degree certificates, freedom from exam results (maybe freedom from bad results would have been acceptable).

As a callow student in the late Seventies, I once found myself hauled up in front of the Student Union Inquisition accused of editing some dodgy magazine (called, in different incarnations, Le Coq and Trash). And found guilty. To this day, I regret being banned from the lesbian collective vegetarian restaurant on campus.

More recently, as a lecturer, I got into trouble for cracking a joke. I had the technology all set up. I was using PowerPoint to illustrate a lecture I was giving on “Ugliness as a Philosophical Concept”. I had barely begun when the screen went blank. A female student in the front row, noting that a vital link between computer and projector had popped out of the socket, exclaimed: “Your little thing just dropped off!” I shot back: “Ah! There you speak to my deepest anxiety!” It got a good laugh from a section of the audience. But the official complaint was not far behind, coming from another section less enamoured of my sense of humour.

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The reality is that the professor is walking a tightrope. It’s easy to fall off. In my own case, on one side lies meaningless gibberish, on the other, the temptation of obscenity and sexual innuendo. I try hard not to use the f-word too often. Maybe I am now too soft. On one particularly atrocious and anonymous piece of work I wrote: “Is this student dyslexic?” I was honestly trying to be sympathetic and helpful here, just for once, wondering if I needed to make some special allowance. I was then asked to write a letter of apology to the student concerned. I was guilty of labelling.

I am guessing that Students for Liberty will be all in favour of lecturers behaving badly. They probably won’t mind me recommending the novels of the Marquis de Sade, as I occasionally do (although I may have to attach a “trigger warning” if I include them on a reading list, in case anyone gets upset).

To be fair, I thought I’d better check with a student. The only one I could text in a hurry was my son Jack, a student until last month, when he signed-off with a prize of £180 and a debt of £36k. I see his point when he says: “I guess I tend to be anti-libertarian insofar as the government has the potential to elongate/preserve life on a massive scale, and that is a greater moral duty/good than total freedom of choice, especially when it's just pretty minor liberties that are in question, such as what cigarettes look like (rather than whether you can smoke them or not). Why is being manipulated by corporations more free than being manipulated by elected governments?”

Maybe all language is fascist (just like this statement). It’s labelling. But I’m not actually against sticking labels on products warning people of possible consequences. After all, it’s not that different to writing remarks at the bottom of an essay. I don’t think information and opinion deprives the consumer of agency. And there will be plenty of counter-propaganda from Students for Liberty among others.

But I think Cambridge and Harvard and colleges around the world should have a label stuck on them warning the consumer that: “The university is an agon in which conflicting views can and will be expressed. It is up to you to make your own mind up. Feel free to ignore this label.”

“By the way,” my son said in a follow-up text: “Generation Snowflake is just a codeword for ‘generation that is far more aware of the widespread ramifications of racism and sexism and ableism’.”

Someone always has to stick a comment at the bottom of your essay, don't they?

Andy Martin is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of “Make Me”’ (Bantam)