STRIDENCY on campus is not only an American problem. Throughout the West it is the young who are most ambivalent about free speech. A recent survey found that two-thirds of British students endorsed the National Union of Students’ “no-platform” policy. Speakers “no-platformed” in Britain include Peter Tatchell, a gay-rights activist who was a hero on campuses in the 1990s but has upset some of today’s students by favouring free speech even for homophobes.

Academics who think education requires the free flow of ideas are appalled. “A university is not a ‘safe space’,” tweeted Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford. “If you need a safe space, leave, go home, hug your teddy & suck your thumb until ready for university.”

According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Centre, 47% of British 18- to 29-year-olds think the government should be able to stop people from saying things that offend other people’s religious beliefs, compared with 32% of those over 50. Fully 55% of French youngsters think that the government should intervene to prevent people from saying offensive things about minority groups, compared with 43% of their compatriots aged 30-49. In Germany 21% of 18- to 29-year-olds think the government should be able to stop the media from publishing information about large political protests, compared with only 9% of 30- to 49-year-olds. Young Americans are less likely to favour unfettered free speech than their elders are, but they are less censorious than young Europeans.

Overall, the global trend in academia is towards muzzling opinions deemed offensive. Students these days grow up “in a rough-and-tumble world on the internet”, notes another Oxford professor, “where abuse is universal”. Social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter now make it possible to report offensive speech or images (this week they agreed to a code in Europe whereby they would block “illegal hate speech”). Years of clicking “report spam or abuse” may now have normalised the idea of silencing speech one disagrees with rather than debating it.