Dan Hitchens

Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. He is currently co-writing a book about Dr Johnson, and writes The Pineapple Substack.

Tuesday

Dan Hitchens

British universities have a duty to defend the ‘unsafe’ space

In the ever-noisier debate about campus censorship, one party has been noticeably silent: the universities themselves. Last week, the journalists Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos were forbidden to debate (on the topic of free speech) by Manchester Students’ Union. Manchester University made no comment. The week before that, Oxford’s SU banned from Freshers’ Fair copies of a student magazine designed to ‘publicise ideas people are afraid to express’; again, the university stood back. Nor did Warwick University intervene when the secularist Maryam Namazie, in the same week, was disinvited by Warwick SU. (After an outcry, they shamefacedly un-disinvited her.) Universities seem to assume that students should be left to sort out these kerfuffles by themselves.

Tuesday

Dan Hitchens

The tragic truth behind the ‘ShoutYourAbortion’ hashtag

Try as I might, I can’t make myself furious about the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag. It is, above all, cause for sadness. Many of the stories women tell about their abortions are, in some form, about social indifference. The women tweeting often say that a baby would have shipwrecked their life chances, that their abortion enabled them to be better mothers to their other children, that it would have been financially unfeasible to carry their pregnancy to term. And in a country such as the US, where over 40pc of women who have abortions live below the poverty line, and the most common reason for a termination is financial insecurity, those are serious concerns. https://twitter.com/MaryEmilyOHara/status/645969048514248704 https://twitter.

Monday

Dan Hitchens

The Prevent strategy has finally reminded the NUS why free speech is worth defending

It is a startling about-turn. The National Union of Students, who have played a considerable role in the dismal recent history of campus censorship, are suddenly sounding as though they have ingested the complete works of John Stuart Mill. The ‘basic function of universities,' the NUS declare, is ‘introducing students to a variety of opinions and encouraging them to analyse and debate them'. They are warning of  ‘a significant threat to civil liberties and freedom of speech on campuses’. This is a reference to the Prevent counter-terrorism guidelines, which come into force at universities today, and which the NUS is promising to oppose at every level. It is tempting to ask the NUS where all this enthusiasm for free speech has come from.

Friday

Dan Hitchens

The Assisted Dying Bill was crushed today, thanks to doctors and disability groups

The best speeches on the Assisted Dying Bill today were intelligent and sensitive - but not terribly new. The arguments were more or less the same as those in every debate on euthanasia for the last 80 years. Free choice vs concerns about the threat to public safety. So it was in 1936 and in 1969; so it was in the House of Lords with the Joffe Bill in 2006, and the amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill in 2009, and in the Scottish Parliament earlier this year. Each time parliamentarians have voted to defend the vulnerable. They did so today by 330 votes to 118.

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Many people feel their life is worthless. The Assisted Dying Bill tells them they might just be right

As Charles Killick Millard conceded, there was an issue about grandparents. Millard, the leading figure of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society back in the 30s, realised that people might cajole their elderly relatives into choosing death. But this had its benefits, he argued: ‘It would make querulous old folk more careful how they dilated upon their aches and pains.’ Havelock Ellis, one of the Society’s celebrity supporters, was blunter: he expressed his annoyance that ‘we are terribly afraid of killing those citizens whom we all regard as financially unpromising.' There is a callousness in those remarks which resurfaces whenever assisted suicide is put forward.

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Students against abortion

In November 2013, the campaign group Abortion Rights announced their first-ever student conference. It was, they explained, in response to ‘many student unions reporting increased anti-choice activity on campuses’. Societies such as Oxford Students for Life, which I’ve been part of for the last couple of years, don’t tend to think of themselves as ‘anti-choice’, but it’s true there are more of us around. The number of young people who are opposed to abortion, or at least worried about it, is growing — this despite the usual hostility from student unions. Just look at the results of a ComRes survey conducted in April.

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Sometimes it’s good to worry

At last, a snappy pop philosophy book which offers to sort out absolutely none of your personal issues. If anything, it will make them worse. ‘There are,’ Francis O’Gorman admits, ‘serious problems for me with the ethics of writing on worry.’ Since words are the very stuff of worry, O’Gorman (himself a worrier) suspects that reading is unlikely to provide a cure. Sufferers would do better to contemplate the sublime balance of Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ (‘a glimpse of a world without fretfulness’) or listen to Bach’s contrapuntal fugues, in which ‘Everything, whatever happens, fits.’ But O’Gorman is not really here to dole out advice: A while ago, I described this book as I was writing it to a friend.

Tuesday

Dan Hitchens

What exactly is the point of the Oxford Professor of Poetry? And will Wole win it?

'People are terribly interested in the election,' said Christopher Ricks before his 2004 inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 'but then not terribly interested in the lecture, which I’m afraid is life.' This year even the election campaign has been quite subdued. There has been no anonymous smear campaign as in 2009, no wildcard candidate like Stephen Moss in 2010 ('Yes we scan!'), and only one, very tame, squabble after Melvyn Bragg switched his support from Wole Soyinka to Simon Armitage. There remains an awkward question about whether the Professorship election deserves all the fuss.