The backlash against the Stepford Students is intensifying

The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might – you guessed it – ’cause offence’.

No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group – the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators – which aspires to ‘welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion’.

Such guiding principles, once the bread and butter of the university experience, are now anathema in many Oxford circles: I’m not surprised that No Offence has been banned from Freshers’ Fair, and Spectator readers ought not to be either.

Brendan O’Neill’s tirade against the ‘Stepford Students’, who prevented him from appearing at an abortion debate in November at Christ Church, Oxford, made him universally known and near-universally hated in the city’s student halls.