Britain's Coddled 'iGens'

A Coming of Age Story

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Students have “become less liberal in their approach to freedom of expression in recent years”, according to a study published this week (Thursday 23rd June). A poll of 1,019 UK undergraduates by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) suggests that they want more restrictions on free speech than their predecessors who came of age around the time of the Brexit referendum.

Specifically, 39% said students’ unions should “ban all speakers that cause offence” – more than double the 16% found last time the survey was undertaken in 2016. More than one-third (36%) of the respondents also believe academics should be fired if they “teach material that heavily offends some students”, up from 15% in 2016.

The proportion expressing strong support for ‘trigger warnings’ has also risen, to one-third (34%) in 2022 from one-quarter (25%) in 2016, and the total proportion offering any support has risen to around nine-in-10 students (86%) from two-thirds (68%).

And when presented with the phrase “if you debate an issue like sexism or racism, you make it acceptable,” the proportion of students expressing some agreement doubled to 35% (up from 17% in 2016) and the proportion expressing complete disagreement halved (down from 38% to 20%).

As the report’s author, Nick Hillman, remarks, it is “abundantly clear” that “a high proportion of students have a very different conception of academic freedom and free speech norms than earlier generations and from many of those who legislate, regulate or govern UK higher education institutions”.

Hillman charitably attributes this decline in support for free speech to the tough time students have had in the past six years – Covid, industrial action, the ‘cost-of-living-crisis’ – leading to a preoccupation with ‘safety’. Maybe so, Toby Young conceded in a piece for the Spectator on the report’s findings, “but surely the main cause is that organisations such as Stonewall and Advance HE have successfully infected British universities with hard-left identitarian ideology under the guise of promoting ‘diversity and inclusion’.”

The metaphor of infection is an interesting one – pursuing it, we might usefully ask how this “hard-left” malady ever managed to ‘take hold’ of its campus ‘hosts’ in the first place. Perhaps the beginnings of an answer are to be found in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). As the title suggests, the book is mainly concerned with the situation in the US, but it may well shed light on quite a lot of what’s happening in the UK, too. 

The book charts the emergence of a culture of “safetyism” amongst so-called ‘iGen’ (i.e., the cohort of kids born from 1995 onwards, who spend most of their waking hours on social-media, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling…). Coddled by parents whilst children, their lives subsequently delimited, scheduled and managed by a panoply of well-meaning, middle-class adults during adolescence, they arrive at early adulthood immature, unprepared for university life and incapable of resolving conflicts and difficult situations on their own. Challenging ideas, people, encounters, concepts, situations, subsequently come to be misrecognised as hostile and threatening to their safety or wellbeing.

Haidt and Lukianoff’s claim is that, aided by highly risk-averse university administrators, these iGens end up establishing campus cultures in which their instinctive, censorial impulses [“X offends me – no-one has the right to offend me!”] are laundered through a style of therapeutic language that evokes such clinical, medicalised, in-patient vulnerability that it remains forever immune to scholarly criticism or argumentative challenge [“X is threatening my wellbeing – no-one has the right to harm my health!”].

Amongst the recommendations Nick Hillman makes to universities looking to challenge the free speech crisis on campus are the following: balancing controversial speakers with other speakers with different viewpoints, supporting students’ unions to foster an open culture, and reassessing formal procedures to ensure they are sufficiently robust.

If Haidt and Lukianoff are right, as I think they are, it’s going to take a lot more than that.