If you are so triggered by student protests then maybe you're the 'special snowflake'

2500 years ago Socrates was put to death by an Athenian regime terrified of philosophers. Last week, his protégé Plato faced a similar fate at SOAS, London. Along with Kant, Descartes, and the whole dead, white chorus. Or so went the story that washed up on the banks of the information stream. If as Whitehead argued, European Philosophy is just a “series of footnotes to Plato”, then to axe him completely would be like cutting the Bible from a Theology course. When students and faculty rushed to explain what was really being proposed, our attention had already shifted and the myth of the student had been further reinforced.

The proliferation of such articles is due not to a critical cultural landslide but the success of a media narrative. A frothing demand for stories of what these bizarre, possibly alien, creatures are up to is met with a willing supply. This symbiotic surge has resulted in the creation of a new character in society’s great soap. The disregard for coherent characterisation raises no eyebrows, for the student’s all-important potential for fuelling tea-spluttering fury is endless.

Between aggressive, calculated intimidation campaigns, they also find time to quiver away in safe spaces, fleeing lectures and books lest they be traumatised. This is Schrödinger’s student – simultaneously quaking and angry, fragile and domineering – the new target for an angry population running out of groups they can openly loathe.

Articles about this mythic species fall into three categories. First, those that are simply untrue. In December, there was a slew of scandalised reports decrying the fact (I use the term loosely) that the Oxford University Student Union was planning to force people to address each other by the gender-neutral pronoun “ze”, not only in tutorials and lectures, but also in a social setting. The claim was false, and met with immediate refutation. OUSU subsequently suggested that the misunderstanding may have arisen from a broader University policy which accepts (without enforcing) neopronouns.

This is not the imposition of a despotic New Order but the gradual expansion of personal freedoms. However so entrenched is the myth that no sooner had the story been discredited than follow-up articles reasserted that is was nevertheless plausible. One Telegraph article read, “The initial relief I felt that these 'neopronouns' were not about to become official policy, soon turned to dread on realising that it wouldn't have been that surprising if they had.”

So dominant is the narrative that it endures as the object of anger and fear even when divorced from fact. Reality – a deluded King Cnut – is drowned by tides of outrage.

Articles in the second category contain elements of truth but distort them wildly, as per the uproar at SOAS, where philosophy students petitioned for greater emphasis on non-European thinkers. This reasonable request for the subtle recalibrating of a curriculum became one more entry in the list of things that students have “BANNED” (word and typography from the Express). This is a University with an explicit and eponymous focus on “Oriental and African Studies” and a degree entitled BA World Philosophies. Education is not a zero-sum game – it is possible to study one thing without spurning another – and it is neither anti-intellectual nor closed-minded to desire a reading list with greater variety. Again the depiction of students is contradictory: they shut down debate even while demanding plurality of thought.

The final category is those stories which are exactly as reported: some students do make fairly radical propositions. On those occasions where truth ducks and dives through the assault course of mass media, a problem lingers. The opinions of individuals are taken as representative of the whole. A commentator, enraged by some pronouncement of a “Rhodes Must Fall” activist, will cite it as evidence in an impassioned diatribe on the sad state of the student body. The reality is that these emblematic figures provide a singular voice in a polyphonic political scene.

There is nothing intrinsic to higher education that shifts you leftwards. Indeed right-wing beliefs across all universities remain common. The Student Politics 2015 survey in advance of the General Election placed voting intentions for Labour and the Conservatives at 31 per cent each. Recent events at Queen Mary provide a neat anecdotal manifestation of this democratic balance. A boycott of newspapers by the Student Union was harmoniously countered by a “Free Speech Society” which dispersed copies personally. It is a mistake to view radicals as a threat to freedom of speech when this is precisely what they embody.

Behind the partisan equilibrium of student politicking lies a more widespread phenomenon: apathy. In 2016 Queen Mary celebrated a voter turnout at Student Union elections that was “higher than in previous years”: 20.5 per cent. The disproportionate public prominence of the politically active minority can be attributed partly to the fact that their battles take place in a mainly online realm, exposed to the prying eyes of easily offended, “snowflake” journalists. Offline, students – as the stats show – are as indifferent as ever. Their day-to-day is filled with the banality of life: eating, sleeping, excreting, copulating. Mind-numbing essays and mind-numbing intoxicants predominate and the Platonic form of the Student remains unchanged. Parties, all-nighters, illegal streaming, ennui: such is the experience of 100 per cent of students 90 per cent of the time and 90 per cent of students 100 per cent of the time.

Ever since the Paris événements of May 1968, a clear student identity has persisted in the popular consciousness. However, historian Didier Fischer contends (in The History of Students in France) that contrary to the established vision of iconoclastic and radical youth, indifference has always far outweighed revolt. And this in highly politicised France, where strikes come around like rainy days. In the UK, home of the stiff upper lip, indifference is hardwired into our patriotic self-image.

None of this is intended to demean an engagement in politics. Many noble campaigns are fought and many great victories won. My hope is merely to calm the rocketing national blood pressure with a much-needed dose of mundane truth.