The latest figure to fall foul of their bizarre and narrow-minded obsessions is Dame Jenni Murray, doyenne of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour

Of all our cultural institutions that have been captured by intolerant Leftist activists, our universities present the saddest and most ridiculous spectacle.

A university is meant to be a place of intellectual enquiry, where young minds obtain an education that will expand their horizons and expose them to the best that Western civilisation has to offer.

But many have fallen very far from this ideal. Instead, they have degenerated into places more of indoctrination than education, wasting precious time pandering to the demands of special interest groups, beset by small-minded and self-absorbed campaigns to do with students’ ‘well-being’.

Universities appear to have forgotten the genuine challenges and lofty pleasures of learning, or their role as key transmitters of our national culture, history and heritage.

The latest figure to fall foul of their bizarre and narrow-minded obsessions is Dame Jenni Murray, doyenne of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

A few weeks ago, she dared to express her opinion that a man who has undergone a sex change to become a woman is still not a woman in the life-long sense of having been born and grown up female.

This would sound like common sense to most of us, or even a statement of the plain and simple truth. But nothing is plain and simple any more.

Murray was due to give a talk last Sunday at the Oxford Literary Festival, but ran into vociferous protests from the Oxford University Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer Society, which wanted to ban her from speaking.

The organisers were, thankfully, unmoved and Murray spoke as planned.

Alas, the sorry story just confirms one’s sense of campuses today as overgrown kindergartens, full of squeaking millennials so painfully conscious of their rights and feelings it seems doubtful they can be conscious of much else.

Like the need to buckle down and get a decent education for the looming world of real life ahead of them, for instance.

Hull University has also devoted time to worrying about non-existent ‘gender problems’. As the Mail reported yesterday, it is the first UK university to make PC language an academic requirement, warning students: ‘Failure to use gender-sensitive language will impact your mark.’

Yet such petty concerns are typical of the thinking that now plagues our places of higher education. There was the ridiculous row about removing the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College, Oxford, because he didn’t think in a 21st-century way. Perhaps that’s because he wasn’t a 21st-century person? Just an idea.

At least Oriel stood its ground — shortly after donors threatened to withdraw support. But the insidious censorship and suppression continues, undermining our nation’s finest places of learning like woodworm or dry rot.

Only last week, Oxford announced it would replace some venerable old portraits of Dead White Males with others featuring women and ethnic minorities.

A spokesman for the University said, however, that the new portraits would add to rather than replace existing ones.

In fact, this attempt to rewrite history has already started. In an outstanding example of idiocy, the university’s Hertford College in recent years experimented by removing portraits of men such as scholar William Tyndale, and putting up photos of newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky and other female graduates and fellows of the College.

Tyndale was one of the first translators of the Bible into English. He gave us such immortal phrases as ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, ‘let there be light’, and ‘signs of the times’. His contribution to Christianity, English history and the world was immeasurable, and he paid for his heretical courage by being burned at the stake in 1536.

Demonstrators outside the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford where radio presenter Jenni Murray was speaking as part of the Oxford Literary Festival

It will seem unlikely to even the biggest admirer of Kaplinsky that 500 years hence she will be as widely venerated. And, of course, where Oxford leads, others follow, in a mad race to prove who is the most progressively daft of all.

Lincoln’s Students’ Union recently closed all social media accounts for the Conservative society, simply because they disliked what they said.

In a similar vein, Cardiff Metropolitan University bans words such as ‘foreman’ and ‘workmanlike’ from usage, advising instead ‘supervisor’ and ‘efficient’. I have to ask: what will happen when these intolerant young people leave their university safe havens and enter the real world?

One hopes it’ll soon knock them into line — but I fear that these self-righteous standard bearers of perpetual moral outrage will soon dominate the workplace as well.

There are ominous signs that their influence is already being felt. Take the recent announcement from HSBC on gender-fluid or ‘non-binary’ personal titles. Utterly straight-faced, HSBC now offers you titles such as: Mx, Mre, and Msr. That last one is if you see yourself as a mix of Miss and Sir.

Of course, the original archetypal Trendy University lecturer was the fictional Howard Kirk, in Malcolm Bradbury’s hilarious novel The History Man from the Seventies. It later became a TV series with Antony Sher.

In one scene, a meeting failed to progress because attendees couldn’t agree whether the term chairman, chairwoman or chairperson should be used.

What was once satire is now reality. The situation may yet deteriorate further. Many of the more extreme manifestations of campus activism originate in the U.S., and then travel here like some sinister infection. And the looniness that now unfolds daily on American university campuses is hard to believe.

California’s universities have ruled that saying ‘America is a land of opportunity’ constitutes a ‘microaggression’ — a subtle, even unconscious, slight against minorities.

Murray was due to give a talk last Sunday at the Oxford Literary Festival, but ran into vociferous protests from the Oxford University Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer Society, which wanted to ban her from speaking

The University of Illinois believes that a classroom full of only white students is a ‘microaggression’ in itself.

Meanwhile, the University of New Hampshire’s list of banned or ‘problematic’ words now includes: ‘fathering’ and ‘mothering’ (because they ‘gender’ the act of parenting), and even ‘American’ (because the term too often ignores the existence of South America).

Naturally, a group at Loyola University in Chicago has announced it is establishing a safe space for ‘self-identified white students’ to explore their feelings of whiteness, acknowledge their manifold sins and ‘begin the journey of operating in solidarity with others and their privilege’.

As for the tricky transgender issue which has caught out poor Jenni Murray, she’s certainly not alone.

Colorado College ran into trouble over screening the gay rights movie Stonewall, because the film didn’t include enough transgender people!

Trans students at the college said the film — on New York riots that sparked the birth of the mainstream gay rights movement — was ‘discursively violent’ and ‘reinforced a hierarchy of oppression’.

Let’s be clear. Opposing this kind of madness isn’t defending anyone’s right to spout racist or any other type of abuse. That’s been illegal for decades, and socially unacceptable for much longer still.

It’s about defending the right to have different, nuanced opinions about complex issues, such as gender reassignment or British imperial history.

The reality is that many people will still have doubts about what sex-change surgery really achieves, or decline to view a figure such as Cecil Rhodes as so unquestionably evil that his likeness must be removed from our public spaces.

Because although there is much to laugh at in the creeping insanity beginning to grip our leading universities, some of our most hard-won values are at stake — free speech foremost among them. After all, if our universities won’t defend free speech, who will?