Vice-Chancellors must intervene to stop the deterioration of free speech at universities, Baroness Ruth Deech has said, as she warns that lecturers are “bowing to student whims” by allowing “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to reign on campus.

The cross-bench peer, a former senior proctor at Oxford University and Principal of St Anne's College, said that the strangle-hold on free speech is damaging the reputation of British institutions.

“Yet the university authorities are complicit in allowing the free exchange of ideas to be closed down, and students are ever more censorious,” she wrote in a letter to The Times.

“They claim a right not to be offended, but we cannot secure freedom of expression if we all also maintain a right not to be offended.”