Give or take some slippage at the top, the latest world university league table has UK institutions still ranking high, with 30 out of the top 200. The capital’s colleges were particularly successful. The London School of Economics, for instance, rose from 71st place in 2014, to 35th in the 2015 list. Mayor Boris Johnson crowed: “London is unequivocally the education capital of the world.”

Meanwhile, his younger brother, Jo, the universities minister, was also addressing British students. He found them “disappointing”. Asked to perform the simple task of policing extremism on campus, they promise to be among the worst students in the world. Johnson minor has been irked by the National Union of Students’ opposition to the imposition of the government’s Prevent programme, a duty to keep any eye on everyone that, if not very British, probably has a precedent in North Korea, as well as Conrad’s tragic Under Western Eyes.

Far from being, as some see it, evidence of the sort of independent thinking that gives intellectual life to universities and contributes, ultimately, to their global success (second only to the US), any unwillingness to serve the extremism taskforce is, in Johnson’s view, laggardly: “We all have a role to play in challenging extremist ideologies and protecting students on campus.” In fact this year’s Ucas applicants might want to make “keen interest in tradecraft” a feature of their personal statements.

The prime minister has further reminded university authorities of their obligations to protect “impressionable young minds”. From Monday, universities must comply, if necessary subject to a court order, with “Prevent duty guidance” on monitoring extremism. The latter being defined, for anyone unclear on what they should be either exposing, or pre-emptively eradicating, as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.

One example of extremism, vocalised before he became shadow chancellor, might be John McDonnell’s comment on Margaret Thatcher; that he wished he could go back and kill her. Another might be this, vocalised by a former member of the pan-Islamic Hizb-ut-Tahrir: “We as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech.”

For “it is not about oppressing free speech or stifling academic freedom”, Mr Cameron promises of his new regulations. “It is about making sure that radical views and ideas are not given the oxygen they need to flourish.” Stifle, verb: “to kill by depriving of oxygen”.

The justification for this exercise turns out, on his part, to be about producing a list of troublemakers and institutions and hoping nobody spots a distinct lack of rigour in asserting a causal connection between attending a UK university and going on to threaten, or take lives. Eight named terrorist offenders, we learn, had been to UK universities.

Not a huge body of evidence, you might think, recalling Britain’s estimated 700 jihadist volunteers. Possibly anticipating this response, the government notes: “Young people continue to make up a disproportionately high number of those arrested for terrorist-related offences and of those travelling to join terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.” And where do we find young people, other than in branches of Nando’s and JD Sports? Campuses.

It follows – to Johnson and Cameron, anyway – that universities must exercise vigilance beyond their existing duties to students, academically, pastorally and in law. It is already an offence, as David Anderson QC says in his latest review of terrorism legislation, to foster hatred that might violently divide communities or to provoke or justify terrorist acts.

Exploring the implications of forthcoming anti-extremist legislation, Anderson suggests the government risks “playing into the hands of those who, by peddling a grievance agenda, seek to drive people further towards extremism and terrorism”.

A government with more faith in its world-leading universities and their students might conclude, from identical evidence on radicalisation, that nowhere is better qualified to expose the dangers and simplifications of extremist thinking than institutions where critical thinking and debate are intrinsic to their existence. “Education,” says Professor Louise Richardson, next vice-chancellor of Oxford, “is the best possible antidote to radicalisation.” It was only, after all, when both students and academics rebelled against the sanctioning of segregated seating on campus that the legality (and propriety) of this was challenged, and replacement advice issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Counter-terrorism and security bill is a threat to freedom of speech at universities | Letter from 524 professors Read more

When further education was identified as the problem, not the solution, vice-chancellors vainly lobbied Theresa May; 550 professors objected to their forthcoming duties, citing a rival one in the Education (No 2) Act 1986: to “ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and for visiting speakers”.

Unfortunately, from students who have increasingly defined legal free speech on campus as a qualified right, opposition to the government scheme seems to have carried still less weight.

As much as one might side with NUS members now being lectured by Jo Johnson, it is difficult to reconcile their opposition to gagging, say, a preacher who believes gay people, adulterers and apostates should be killed, with their own representatives’ willingness to no-platform allegedly “whorephobic” or otherwise discriminatory speakers. Students opposing Prevent say it will close down free discussion of ideas and, as one objects, “not allow students to become critical thinkers”. But when unaccompanied by the charge of encouraging Islamophobia, this argument has not proved robust enough to allow students free discussion with, for instance, the no-platformed Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel.

Around the time the government’s counter-terrorism provisions were being attacked by university staff for endangering free speech on campus, the online magazine Spiked drew up a league table of student censoriousness, and claimed that 80% of UK universities had restrictions on free speech. Mary Beard was persecuted for signing a round robin critical of no-platforming, whose signatories included a known campus thought-criminal.

Allowing for possible exaggeration and mischief, recent advances in student intolerance, allegedly to protect the vulnerable, still seem to have much in common with Jo Johnson’s condescension. If endorsement of rape culture, in the shape of Robin Thicke’s abject song, should be expunged on campus for protective reasons, it is not entirely clear why rape culture, in the shape of a preacher who endorses the enslavement and rape of enemy women, should not be similarly suppressed. And vice-versa.

The current wave of the NUS’s anti-Prevent defiance only makes sense, surely, if that body reasserts its trust, unlike the government, in its members’ ability to confront unpalatable ideas and distinguish them from the actionably hateful.

The most effective response to Cameron’s assault on British values might be the addition to the ever-expanding cadre of safe-space enforcers, of a new generation of NUS free speech officials.