‘I think that’s unfortunate’

An outgoing executive at Oxford University says students now are claiming “a right not to be offended,” and that’s “unfortunate.”

Many young adults, often those college-age, have become known as “snowflakes” for their hypersensitivity to others’ opinions.

In fact, their attitudes about those who hold opinions differing from theirs is a large part of the contemporary agenda to censor speech of conservatives. Social media companies, in fact, routinely have tried to suppress or even eliminate statements of opinion that differ from their own liberal ideologies.

Now a report in the Telegraph cites comments from Dame Louise Richardson, the outgoing vice chancellor at Oxford.

She said, in an interview with the student publication Cherwell, that “there is a view amongst some students – and it’s not all students – there is a right not to be offended.”

“I think that’s unfortunate. I’d like to persuade them that that’s not a healthy approach to take,” she continued.

Her opinion is that some parts of “the press” like to beat up on universities over the issue of free speech.

“But I think we’re pretty robust on the issue, even if not every student or every staff member would agree with me precisely on where to draw the lines. My own view is that all legal speech should be welcomed at universities,” she said.

She said, previously, that students need to be ready to “hear the other side” and that they should use reason to debate those who hold differing opinions.

She offered insight into her own perspectives. Growing up in Ireland, she said, Oliver Cromwell was considered “the devil incarnate.” Then when she arrived in London, his statue was outside the House of Commons.

“And I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, that’s Cromwell. Well, isn’t that fascinating? Here we are, a few hundred miles away, and this man who I was brought up to see as an evil butcher has been lionized’,” she said.

But she said it never occurred to her the statue should “be ripped down,” as already has happened to numerous historical figures in the United States because their perspectives are now denounced by the politically correct ideologies because promoted.

The Daily Mail said Richardson’s comments came “amid rising numbers of woke rows at campuses across the country and attempts to restrict free speech.”

In both the U.K. and the United States there have been multiple fights at the college level where students demand the removal of staff or faculty who express their opinion that marriage is between a man and a woman, or that men who call themselves women should not be given open access to private facilities designed for women, such as restrooms and showers.