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