How did so many of today's students turn into snowflakes

How did so many of today's students turn into snowflakes



As anyone who has read a newspaper in the past few months will know, this planet boasts two kinds of snowflakes.

One is an exquisite natural wonder, formed from a single tiny crystal, which falls through the sky, attracting cloud droplets which accumulate in dazzling patterns of ice.

The other is rather less of a wonder. Formed from a single tiny brain cell, it wafts through the British university system in a cloud of victimhood, attracting similarly strident comrades who accumulate in student unions and spaces where they are safe from criticism and hurtful ideas.

You may think I am being harsh. Indeed, when I first read the headlines about the so-called ‘snowflake generation’ — a generation of students intolerant of dissent, who melt when forced to confront tricky challenges, suffused with a sense of their own entitlement — I wondered if they had been exaggerated.

As a former lecturer myself, I knew things in our universities were bad — but surely they weren’t that bad?

But recently, I read two stories about my own alma mater, Oxford, which confirmed all my worst fears.

The first concerns a former law student at Jesus College, Catherine Dance, who is suing the university for loss of earnings.

She claims that because the college refused to give her special treatment for her chronic anxiety — for example, she wanted to sit her exams in a private room with a laptop — she had to take a break from her degree, and therefore graduated a year late and missed out on a year’s wages.

The second concerns one Sophie Spector, a former student of politics, philosophy and economics at my old college, Balliol.

Miss Spector thought the college should give her special treatment, including extended deadlines, because she suffered from anxiety and depression, and was, in her own words, ‘a really slow reader’.

But the college refused, she fell behind and eventually she left.

The details are different, but the story is basically the same. Indeed, if you talk to anybody who works in British universities, it is a very familiar tale.

Of course, many students are relatively sane and sensible people. Thanks to the economic pressures of the modern world, the majority are also probably some of the hardest-working in history.

Indeed, last week’s A-level results mean that at least 416,000 new students will be enrolling for university courses.

All the same, there is simply no denying that there now exists a pernicious culture of narcissism and self-obsession at our universities.

This began among a tiny group of Left-wing student activists — the apostles of ‘safe spaces’ (where people are protected from ideas that make them uncomfortable) and ‘no-platforming’ (when students proscribe, or refuse to give a platform to, speakers they disagree with).

But it is now seeping into mainstream national life.

Inside the classroom it is bad enough. One academic friend recently told me about a student who objected to receiving any criticism at all, no matter how well-intentioned or gently put.

The student simply believed that if she delivered her essays on time, she was entitled to get a First.

This, too, is a very common story. Having been raised to think they are special, garlanded with praise and showered with A-grades as teenagers, students have come to believe they are entitled to success, whether they deserve it or not. If they fail, it is the university’s fault — never theirs.

It is outside the classroom, though, that the new student narcissism is most poisonous.

Just think, for example, of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which sought to tear down a little statue of the Victorian empire-builder and Oxford donor Cecil Rhodes.

Since the statute was high above a busy road, where virtually nobody ever saw it, the activists could hardly claim that it made any difference to the people of Oxford.

But they didn’t care about the people of Oxford. They only cared about themselves.

In their own words, they felt ‘oppressed and marginalised’ by the statue, even though they had to go out of their way just to glimpse it. Merely walking down the street, in one of the most privileged educational institutions in the world, was apparently enough to reduce them to tears.



If that sounds ridiculous, there is much worse where it came from. It is at Oxford, for example, that the university’s Equality and Diversity Unit advised students that if they avoided eye contact with each other, they might be in danger of committing ‘racist micro-aggressions’.

In fact, there are so many examples of the cult of victimhood that I could probably fill every page in this newspaper, from the students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, who complained that dishes such as ‘Jamaican Stew’ and ‘Tunisian Rice’ were yet more ‘racist micro-aggressions’, to the National Union of Students, which has tried to ban clapping and cheering because they could ‘trigger