Could you write them or link to them too? Thanks.
> Postgraduate students at Magdalen College have voted to remove a portrait of the monarch based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding, taken in 1952, at the time she was crowned.
> The portrait, purchased in 2013 by students to decorate the Middle Common Room (MCR), the room that houses them, has been removed because it was an unwelcoming symbol of the UK's "recent colonial history".
Something about slavery, idk
> An Oxford University college has decided to keep its statue of a Barbados-born slave owner.
> All Souls College has dropped the name Christopher Codrington from its library
The concept of audible clapping
> Representatives from the Student Union (SU) passed a motion last week to replace clapping with “jazz hands” in hopes that this will make events “more inclusive” and “accessible” for those with the mental health condition.
> This comes after the University of Manchester made international headlines for passing a similar motion in September 2018.
In general it seems we import a lot of cultural nonsense from other Anglo countries even if its not quite relevant.
Granted, there are certainly tankie students in US colleges - but they don't usually run official Twitter accounts of student societies endorsed by the college. It reminded me more of the kind of stuff Orwell was writing about the UK intelligentsia in 1945:
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice. One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
So I think there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the Atlantic. ~