Intrinsic to being a baby boomer, as PJ O’Rourke says in his memoir of being one, was to hold your parents’ generation, the one that survived the war, in total contempt. “During the 60s,” he says, “we would talk about our parents, as a group, in a way that today we would be embarrassed to talk about militant Islamic fundamentalists, as a group.” On campus, and in student politics, older people, of all ranks, got the same treatment. “The Vietnam war,” he writes, “was a permission slip for nice middle-class kids to mock authority figures, vandalise property and get chased by the police.”

Even if the relevant parents and authority figures weren’t, in fact, reactionary, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic, prudish, conventional, militaristic, pious, hypocritical Mary Whitehouse-sympathisers, youthful boomer convention was to rebuke them accordingly. Approved templates for the new balance of power included, for instance, Bob Dylan’s The Times They are A-Changin’ and the Garnett family, in Till Death Us Do Part. The BBC series started in 1965, only a year after Dylan included in his anthem, this tip for parents: “Don’t criticise what you can’t understand.”

Few episodes of Till Death Us Do Part are still viewable, to testify – as well as to the staggering racism then permissible for parodic purposes – the speed with which this generational rebalancing was evidently effected. Alf Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell, is, as I remember from watching as a child, a spluttering, all-purpose relic and grotesque, while the sofa occupied by Mike, his idle son-in-law (Cherie Blair’s father, Anthony Booth) doubles as the moral high ground. “You and your bloody wars,” Mike taunts. Garnett, the ignoramus, rants against the youth of today, with “no respect, mocking their elders and betters”.

Mercifully for the older boomers, as they grew up and got mortgages, most would not have to endure similarly relentless, culturally reinforced attacks from their children: Alf Garnett made way for triumphant Edina, in Absolutely Fabulous. On campus, as disapproving former agitators have recorded, student rebellion likewise atrophied. O’Rourke and his fellow boomers would be allowed to go on, he predicted, as the venerated, if smug, ideal. “We’ll all turn into us eventually.”

No doubt. Even if some of the youth of today are acting distinctly reluctant. After decades of what were, to judge by the lack of reported outrage, harmonious and only moderately debauched campus proceedings, scarcely a week now passes without some fresh student affront to the values of their elders and betters, prompting levels of academic and media headshaking not witnessed since Malcolm Muggeridge, as rector of Edinburgh University, encountered the permissive society. He resigned in 1968, in St Giles’s Cathedral, citing “not so much disapproval as contempt” for student drug taking and promiscuity.

Which is not to suggest current anxiety about student repression isn’t justified. When not dreaming up new kinds of censorship, under the guise of safe-space protection or trigger warnings, students are reviving blasphemy laws, defending pre-Philip Larkin-era sex segregation, piously policing the language so as not to upset local sectarians – objecting vehemently to words and acronyms that their politically correct parents had been assured were one hundred per cent acceptable.

And none of Garnett’s wartime heroes, surely, was ever more disrespected than now, by censorious twentysomethings, are luminaries in the boomer pantheon. Certainly, if students wanted to wind their liberal-minded parents up to the degree that insulting Winston Churchill once worked on their grandparents, they could do no better than sneer at Germaine Greer, or no-platform Julie Bindel, Mona Eltahawy, or Maryam Namazie, or turn their noses up at Peter Tatchell, who did not even, it turns out, bomb Dresden. He signed a letter.

Once you have reduced a despairing parent to spluttering: “But you wouldn’t even be TALKING about this if it wasn’t for Peter Tatchell/Germaine Greer/Julie Bindel”, or: “Don’t you realise he/she fought – suffered! – for your freedom to do this?”, you have a parent you have turned, pretty much, into Alf Garnett. Albeit, a boomer Garnett who thinks Lolita’s British publishers got it right, in 1959, and that trigger warnings for undergraduate readers of Lolita presage intellectual catastrophe. All credit, then, to the resourceful youth of today, for reclassifying millions of adults as something they never wanted to be: angry, confused reactionaries. To be fair, not always confused: Peter Tatchell is clear on the “intimidating, excluding atmosphere on campuses”, and some of my colleagues have long argued that universities should have done much more to stop their campuses, of all places, becoming hostile to free expression.

Only recently, with an article by a former defender of sex-segregated audiences, Nicola Dandridge, and a declaration from Oxford’s first female vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, have prominent university leaders begun to denounce student censorship as incompatible with learning. “I hope,” said Richardson, “that universities will continue to defend the imperative of allowing even objectionable ideas to be spoken.” By way of illustration, her Oxford co-worker, Lord Patten, proposed that anyone who disagreed with him about the Cecil Rhodes statue might want to leave.

Elsewhere, it’s less obvious how concerned any non-academic, with no ambitions to debate the NUS LGBT officer in Canterbury, should be about student intolerance. What other forms of iconoclasm are so inviting, after all, to the descendants of lightly tattooed boomers with a lifelong Glastonbury habit? Having initially measured high on the Alf Garnett scale of indignation, I now wonder if there isn’t a better case for students fighting it out, so long as they censor only one another; or at least for ignoring their more eccentric bylaws, such as bans on sombreros.

The massive surge in student numbers, coinciding with Twitter and online publication of student papers ensures we hear more that we used to, or maybe need to, about intra campus obsessions that once, in their wilder, 60s iterations, brought about Muggeridge’s completely pointless resignation. Contemporaneous student agitators, it is worth remembering, included those hotheads Gordon Brown and Jack Straw, NUS leader in 1969. Maybe sombrero bans will enjoy the same longevity as Jack Straw’s plan to build a Chilean youth centre, for reasons that, a British diplomat alleged, related only to Jack Straw’s advancement.

On the other hand, current students have far more cause than he for intergenerational resentment, including, in no particular order, terrifying loans, inadequate teaching, chilling rents, rule by Etonians, no houses and, imminently, the prospect of having to work, probably still living at home, until they are practically dead. If they are now creating such impressive quantities of upset, most cherishably from the inflamed Lord Patten, out of what appears to be – when compared with uprooting cobblestones or reading Das Kapital – some fairly undemanding attitudinising, you can see the appeal. As for our government, like-minded where the suppression of unwanted speakers is concerned: it could hardly wish for more.