What the hell happened to students? We’re all ‘ban-happy stony-eyed suppressors’

We’re all a load of ban-happy suppressors who are only interested in beer-fuelled banter, according to Brendan O’Neill. 

First they came for Robin Thicke and then they came for The Sun.

Next, Dapper Laughs was banned from taking to the stage at uni towns across the country.

Now, Oxford has become the latest uni to join the banned-wagon after a pro-abortion debate was axed earlier this week.

Talking about the debate in today’s Spectator, O’Neill says we’ve become a new breed of student who “look like students, dress like students, smell like students.

“But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform.”

Christ Church Oxford scheduled a debate between Brendan and journalist Tim Stanley called “This House believes abortion culture hurts us all” which was supposed to be held on Tuesday.

But the college was forced axe the event when a handful of furious students decided Brendan and Tim couldn’t speak because they don’t have a uterus.

Furious Brendan has now branded the students of Oxford “Stepford students” who don’t want to hear controversial opinions.

He said: “[They sit] stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar.

“They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform.

“To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.”

Brendan continued: “Apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion.

“A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off.

“They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students.”

Brendan added students these days have shifted from engaged and open to repressed and fragile.

He said: “If your go-to image of a student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind’s picture bank.

“Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It’s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have.

“From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation.”

Read the abortion speech they tried to stifle on Spiked.