Free speech is quickly losing ground to feelings and, perhaps, nowhere is this more evident than on college campuses.

Recently, an article appeared in Psychology Today entitled “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.” The author of the piece, Peter Gray, was invited to what he calls “a major university” to meet with the head of counseling services. Emergency calls to counseling services had doubled in the preceding years from students who felt traumatized by common life experiences, like being called a name by a roommate. At this college, teachers were also feeling the pressure as a poor grade could cause students to melt down. In short, students were being so insulated from real life that the smallest discomfort sent them into a tailspin. That head of counseling looked into the experience of other schools and found that this was incredibly common among colleges.

A summary of some of the themes from that counselor:

• Less resilient and needy students have shaped the landscape for faculty in that profs are expected to do more handholding, lower their academic standards and not challenge students too much.
• There is a sense of helplessness among the faculty. Many faculty members expressed their frustration with the current situation. There were few ideas about what they could do as an institution to address the issue.
• Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks. They need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development.
• Faculty, particularly young faculty members, feel pressured to accede to student wishes lest they get low teacher ratings from their students. Students email about trivial things and expect prompt replies.
• Failure and struggle need to be normalized. Students are very uncomfortable in not being right. They want to re-do papers to undo their earlier mistakes. We have to normalize being wrong and learning from one’s errors.
• Faculty members, individually and as a group, are conflicted about how much “handholding” they should be doing.
• Growth is achieved by striking the right balance between support and challenge. We need to reset the balance point. A “helicopter institution” isn’t want students truly need.

It’s not just American colleges that are swaddling their students, either. The University of Manchester in England decided to hold a debate on censorship entitled “From liberation to censorship: Does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?” Taking part in the debate were feminist activitist Julie Bindel and men’s rights activist and University of Manchester alum Milo Yiannapoulos, promising a spirited discussion that would get attendees thinking. Then, the feelings police got involved.

On October 6, Bindel was banned from the debate, with the Student’s Union Executive Team saying that Bindel’s previous comments regarding transgenderism were “potentially in breach of safe space policy.” Now, Yiannapoulos has been banned as well, for speaking out on the rights of men to be presumed innocent in cases of rape and questioning the validity of rape statistics. The Student’s Union Executive Team said in a statement,  “Further to our previous decision to ban Julie Bindel from speaking on campus, we are extending this decision to Milo Yiannopoulos.”

So, where does that leave the Free Speech and Secular Society, which was hosting the debate? Well, it leaves them with a debate on censorship that has been so censored neither debater is allowed to speak. The group is quoted as saying, “We object to this illiberal banning of both Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos. We do not endorse the views of either of the speakers but merely wish to hear them speak and challenge them on what they say. While both speakers have said things one might disagree with, they do not incite to violence and do not pose a danger to students.”

College is supposed to be a place for young people to expand their thinking, to be confronted with ideas outside of their traditional worldview, to prepare for adulthood. Feminism is (or, at least, was) supposed to be about empowering women.

As Yiannapoulos said “Indeed, the whole point of the debate was to consider whether feminism has a problem with unfettered speech. I think now we know.”