Are students really too fragile for Shakespeare?

What’s the point of a university? Regrettably, that’s a genuine question. The censorship and trigger warnings that are rife on British campuses make it hard to work out what our formerly esteemed institutions of higher education are for anymore, now that free speech, intellectual challenge and the pursuit of truth have become deeply unfashionable.

Hundreds of freedom-of-information requests were sent out by the Times to officials across 140 UK universities. The responses found that trigger warnings, telling students that certain works might be upsetting or even traumatising, have been applied to more than 1,000 texts. At least ten universities have even removed books from reading lists or made them optional out of concerns they might ‘harm’ students.

Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, was among the books affected. It was removed from an English course at the University of Essex over its ‘graphic description of violence and abuse of slavery’. Miss Julie, the classic play by August Strindberg, has been ‘permanently withdrawn’ from a literature module at the University of Sussex because it contains discussion of suicide.

Other texts have been made optional on account of their ‘challenging’ content.