On Monday, Vogue’s website, unusually straying into academia, reported: “Eyebrows were raised when the first erotic novel in the English language, Fanny Hill, was dropped from an 18th-century literature course ‘for fear of offending students’.” This followed a headline in the Mail on Sunday: “Erotic novel first banned 270 years ago for describing a young girl’s sexual exploits is censored AGAIN – in case it upsets students.” Both assertions were incorrect, neatly illustrating how freedom of speech so easily slides into the murky realms of Trumpian “post-truth”.

John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill (a play on mons veneris – the mount of Venus) was published in 1748. He began it as a young man working in the East India Company in Bombay in response to a challenge to write what became the first English pornographic novel without using coarse language. He completed it in his 30s, in debtor’s prison, writing to pay for his freedom. He returned to jail soon after, convicted on obscenity charges.

Fanny Hill became an underground hit for more than 200 years. Unlike previous continental pornography written in Latin or Greek, accessible only to the educated, the book was written in English at its most flowery and, frequently, comical best. Or, according to the moralists and critics, at its worst. They were not amused, for instance, by Fanny’s enthusiasm when confronted by “a maypole” and an “engine of love assaults”, or her evident enjoyment of both: “What floods of bliss! What melting transports!”

The alleged dropping of Fanny Hill from a university course, taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, appeared to hint at yet another example of the “snowflake” generation of students in action. They shy away from what displeases them; dictate content of courses; no-platform speakers (Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell on grounds of transphobia) and establish “safe spaces” on campus so that unsettling debates that might “trigger” concern can be avoided. It results in what Judith Shapiro, the former president of New York City’s Barnard College, calls “self-infantilism”, ill-equipping students to see the world as others see it.

So has Fanny Hill been “snowflaked”? Professor Judith Hawley teaches the course but, as she explained in a Guardian article, Fanny Hill hadn’t been dropped because it had never been included. What she had said as a participant in a fascinating Radio 4 investigation into the history of freedom of speech, broadcast during the previous week, had been misrepresented.

What she said is this: “In the 1980s I protested against the opening of a sex shop in Cambridge and taught Fanny Hill. Nowadays, I am afraid of causing offence to my students, in that I can understand why a senior academic imposing a pornographic text on students would come across as objectionable but also that the students would slap me with a trigger warning, in a way that I now self-censor …”

“Trigger warnings” flag up references that might disturb. In the 1980s the issues raised by Fanny Hill, including desire, pornography and power, were important to discuss. Now, she explained, “the student body is larger, more diverse, less privileged and more uncertain about the future, and the ubiquity of pornography has changed the terms of the debate”.

Her words reveal the tricky area we have rightly entered, in which the long-held power of establishments which are affluent, academic, political, white and male are under challenge. The market too has played a role. Students are now not only learners but customers, paying up to £9,000 a year and, therefore, expecting to define what value for money means to them, the consumer. The ability to identify “triggers”, signalling material that might “damage”, may be a customer perk but it infects education with caution and “self-censorship” that undermines its very purpose. Students, ironically, as a result, are being short-changed.

In the 1980s, when Hawley was campaigning to stop the opening of a sex shop, sexism was rife, reflected in language that today is policed by a consensus on what is acceptable, backed by legislation. Political correctness helped to put the foot on the brakes – but how far down should the foot go? In a poll by the National Union of Students last year, over 60% were in favour of no-platforming. But silencing voices has a price. How does society decide when the cost becomes unacceptable?

In the US, the right to freedom of speech is enshrined in the first amendment. As long ago as the 1990s, the law professor and anti-pornography campaigner Catharine MacKinnon warned, in Only Words, “The law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course ...” Or, as she put it more succinctly, “some people get a lot more speech than others”.

In the 80s I protested against a sex shop in Cambridge and taught Fanny Hill. Now, I’m afraid of offending my students. Professor Judith Hawley

How to decide who gets to talk about what – and where and why – is part of any dynamic democracy. But a guiding instinct should surely be that we learn from open and unafraid debate? A couple of years ago, students at New York’s Columbia University supplied a flyer against homophobia for student rooms . It read: “I want this space to be a safer space.” One student. Adam Shapiro, objected. He told the New York Times “ If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimised by traumatisation, that sounds like a great mission”. But he explained that both professors and students are increasingly loath to say anything that might hurt feelings: “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space.” The question is one of balance. So, back to Fanny Hill and Hawley’s implied argument that, 30 years on, to teach it need no longer be a requirement. Fanny is a woman who admires other women. She has a sexual appetite that includes lesbianism (but, of course, as the book is a fantasy written by a man, the encounter is nothing in comparison to a “store bag of nature’s pure sweets”). At the end of the book, Fanny is neither “fallen” and destroyed, nor an outcast, but is married to the man who deflowered her, whom she loves and who is very rich. Fanny has it all.

She is thus, in some ways, a female pioneer. Arguably, far from being an oppressive text which might make students feel coerced, as Hawley asserts, it is surprisingly subversive of patriarchal politics. “Smutty” books have often become milestones in society. In 1960, for instance, the Obscene Publications Act saw Penguin Books in the dock. Mervyn Griffiths QC famously asked the jury about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The answer was yes, and two million copies were sold in a year. They were bought, like Fanny Hill, by hoi polloi. The acquittal marked an important step for freedom of the written word and the end of what George Orwell called “the striped-trousered ones who rule”.

Other notable books – Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Nabokov’s Lolita – might also run the risk of censorship by one group or another in today’s delicate academic ecosystem. What’s unclear is who gets to have the louder voice and why. Out of university, in the real world, “triggers” aren’t available, nor is it possible to duck issues that “hurt”.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, students were taught too often from curriculums that covered only half the story, omitting women, ethnic minorities and the working class. The clamour for change grew. But Orwell’s “intellectual cowardice” is an ongoing issue as we struggle to forge a different, more just balance of power and a new model of freedom of expression. Of course it isn’t easy, but it’s worth the doing.