If applied to other writers Kipling's treatment by students would herald the end of literature

This week, students at Manchester University made headlines for scrubbing Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If” from a wall in a university building. Kipling, they claim, represents “the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights”.

Student grandstanding and attempts to erase controversial figures from campuses are nothing new – and Kipling has long been controversial. To many he remains, rightly or wrongly, the “jingo imperialist” of Orwell’s phrase, synonymous with Britain’s colonial past.

Yet, in some ways, this is a departure from previous practice. “If” is a far cry from poems such as “The White Man’s Burden”, an unambiguous call for imperial expansion. A staple of funeral readings and best man speeches, it is routinely voted the nation’s favourite poem. Taking the form of an exchange of advice from father to son, the poem abounds with Victorian stoicism – but imperial bigotry is nowhere to be seen.

The sanitising of school and university curricula, and the introduction of “trigger warnings” to accompany academic texts, represent a milder form of this impulse. However, censoring material that is, in itself, inoffensive, on the basis that its author may have been “offensive” elsewhere, represents the hardening of an already illiberal stance.