Free Republic

Politically Correct Universities 'Are Killing Free Speech' British universities have become too politically correct and are stifling free speech by banning anything that causes the least offence to anyone, academics argue Javier Espinoza, and Gordon Rayner 18 Dec British universities have become too politically correct and are stifling free speech by banning anything that causes the least offence to anyone, a group of leading academics warns on Saturday. A whole generation of students is being denied the “intellectual challenge of debating conflicting views” because self-censorship is turning campuses into over-sanitised “safe spaces”, they say. Their intervention comes as an Oxford...

In a matter of only a few decades, counselling has replaced fortitude as our culturally approved way of confronting misfortune. A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It is the superstition of our age. Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, examines this curious, and by no means harmless, phenomenon in some detail. Only...

'There are no heroes in this drama.' With his new book Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age, Frank Furedi, professor of sociology, prolific author and trenchant critic of the fears and fads of our times, can expect to attract as many new enemies as he can friends. Like his previous books, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear, Furedi's Therapy Culture - published in the UK today by Routledge - takes a contemporary theme close to people's hearts and knocks it on the head. With its criticisms of the 'growth industry' of counselling and the spread of concepts such...

'There are no heroes in this drama.' With his new book Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age, Frank Furedi, professor of sociology, prolific author and trenchant critic of the fears and fads of our times, can expect to attract as many new enemies as he can friends. Like his previous books, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear, Furedi's Therapy Culture - published in the UK today by Routledge - takes a contemporary theme close to people's hearts and knocks it on the head. With its criticisms of the 'growth industry' of counselling and the spread of concepts such...