Who defines what is so traumatic that someone shouldn’t speak to students?

That students are becoming rather hardline about speakers they disagree with visiting their campuses is now well described. Brendan O’Neill first explained the ‘Stepford Student’ phenomenon in the Spectator, and in today’s Times David Aaronovitch described his own encounter with a student leader who believes speakers who may upset students should be banned from campuses.

What was particularly interesting about Aaronovitch’s Newsnight discussion last week was that Toke Dahler, his opponent, seemed quite concerned that students shouldn’t suffer ‘trauma’ as a result of a speaker being on their premises.

Aside from all the arguments about the importance of a clash of ideas, especially when some of those ideas are foolish and not persuasive, the concept of ‘trauma’ is interesting. It is an unfair caricature to suggest that all these students who want to stop certain speakers coming to their campuses are censorious twits who are upset just by the possibility that someone might disagree with them (though the way some people conduct themselves on Twitter shows us that this arrogance about our own ideas does indeed exist).