To attend university is not only to learn more, and to learn it with richer attendant insight, it is also thereby to mature one’s intellect, to grow up, to become an enfranchised adult in mind. Recreating nursery conditions to protect oneself even from mention of what happens in unvarnished human experience is a perversion of that process. In America, students call their universities “school”; alas, it seems that the cotton-wool connotation of that term is too literally carried across to what should be very unlike school in a number of respects. University is where one is not only taught, but learns independently; where one is not only guided, but challenged; where there are not teachers and pupils, but colleagues; where a steady gaze is directed at the data of life and the world, with the aim of understanding both.