Studying’s too bourgeois for these entitled clowns, but who doesn’t love a protest, right?

If you grew up in Oxford, as I did, you will know what academia can do to the mind. It can turn even quite sharp, intelligent people into wailing, blabbering, urine-stained perpetual children, insulated from life’s difficulties by huge funding, grants, stipends.

Unsurprisingly, over many years, this has changed the face of education. Rare now are the Nobel prizewinners, the geniuses, the subtle, great minds. More typically, academia attracts freeloaders, pisstakers, lightweights and middle-class frauds, all coasting through life on an arrogant wave of private (often foreign) money, endowments, rich campuses and grade inflation.

It’s a racket: just as long as you can half-fill out some grant form, you can do whatever you want.

Take this incredible PhD subject: “My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the Romantic transatlantic imagination from 1760 to 1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift.”

Just who funds that? I couldn’t, gun to head, even pinpoint what school it was — history, sociology, politics or English? One thing I do know, though: whoever writes that dissertation is of no use to society at all.

I’m citing, of course, the PhD proposal of Johannah King-Slutzky, a pro-Palestinian protester and student at Columbia University in New York.

You’ve possibly heard about the protests: thousands of students are staging sit-ins across America to protest against the “genocide” in the Middle East.

Taking over a campus building last week, with 30 or 40 of the world’s other richest young people, King-Slutzky, dressed in what looked like a brand new Palestinian scarf — where did all the old grotty, genuine ones go? I miss them — demanded the university provide “humanitarian aid” to the people inside the building.

“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation?” she said at a press conference on the building’s steps. They may be on “an Ivy League campus, but this is basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like …” She looked snitty. “Could people please have a glass of water?”

She sounded like Kim Kardashian.

I watched the exchange in astonishment: how does an intelligent, critically aware person arrive at this absurd paragraph? It’s not the side of the Israel-Gaza battle she’s chosen — although we’ll come to that later. It’s the narcissism, the performative arrogance, the fake victimhood, and the lack of self-awareness, not to mention the complete insult to the people she’s meant to be supporting, of whom she, and everyone else, appears to know little or nothing.

Can’t she see that neither she nor anyone else who goes to Columbia (annual fees $89,587) is comparable to a starving, bombed, broken or dead Palestinian child? Yet these students perpetuate the fantasy: the tents they’re living in and protesting out of aren’t just tents, but “encampments”. The war in Gaza isn’t just the war in Gaza; it’s their “Vietnam” (another insult, by the way, to the students who did go to Vietnam, and actually died).

One nepo baby protester, the pouting daughter of the congresswoman Ilhan Omar, sprayed at a rally with “Liquid Ass” — a kind of stink bomb — claimed she’d been the victim of a “chemical weapons attack”. Really? Meanwhile, students scream for food, space, “intifada”, “hammocks”; the latest demand from Columbia law students is “passing grades”. The university must cancel their exams and give them passes, they wrote, because they were “irrevocably shaken” by the “violence” when the university president asked police to turn up, arresting 100.

“Passing grades”. This is what happens when the most individualistic society on earth tries to do Marxism. Education, literally, becomes worthless — a mere commodity.

The temptation, of course, is to laugh at them — at their vanity, their myopia, their tantrums, their Gucci/Balenciaga/whatever scarves (Omar’s daughter wore another pristine Palestinian shroud). But I just feel great fear and pity: how could these clever people be so incredibly stupid? What does that mean for us?

There’s no doubt where it all comes from: a generation raised to be the most educated, enlightened, anti-racist, pro-equality ever. Well, guess where that ends up. A few years ago the same people might have been screaming, “Black lives matter” — now they’re wearing totally different outfits, listening to a muezzin, praying, eating lentils and telling black people, “You’re being an agitator on purpose.”

“Look at these white liberals,” one black student said at UCLA, “cosplaying as the oppressed, stopping the African-American from accessing school. Nothing new.”

Are these students aware they’re racist? To block Jewish students, to harass them, to demand “divestment” of Jewish funds from their seats of learning — how can they not see it for what it is? As for supporting the murderous, vile Hamas — I almost feel sorry for them. Don’t they have any better causes? At least I had tuition fees.

Where does it end? As it happens, the notoriously welcoming and mellow, pro-learning Houthis have now said any students kicked out of Columbia can come and study at Sanaa University. I wonder if King-Slutzky will take them up on the offer. Or are they — how to put it? — not accepting women?

As for the rest of us, the total collapse of education in the West — the collapse of critical thinking, of intelligence, of values, of free speech, even — is the biggest story of our lifetime. Yet no one ever speaks about it. Why? Is it because the very people we rely on to ask these questions — to have urgent debates on profound issues — have grown lazy, entitled and flush with money and decided they can no longer be bothered to fulfil their critical function in society? Instead they’ll take the funding and simply fall asleep, occasionally distracting us with increasingly bizarre, empty, vexatious positions on Gaza, race, trans. Or fatuous PhD proposals.

You joined a men’s club, guys. It means no women

Garrick vote on Tuesday. Will the infamous thespian men’s club allow women in?

John Simpson, Stephen Fry and Sting (lol) have all said they will leave if members reject them.

To which I say: just what did these clowns think they were getting into? They must have been vaguely aware of the nature of the club before they joined it. It’s not exactly a secret that it only allows men.

But even if they hadn’t been aware — if they were, say, too busy playing the lute/doing yoga/giving “their” Hamlet — how long did it take them to work out that they hardly ever saw any women? At what point did it dawn on these utter geniuses that what they’d signed up for wasn’t, actually, a gorgeous, progressive, politically ambrosial, sexy, perfectly inclusive club?

My hunch is that John Simpson etc did know, didn’t care and had zero interest in supporting women, right up until it looked bad for them.

Even now, some of them seem to think it’s someone else’s fault. The club’s chairman was told last week that all the bad feeling had “jeopardised” their relations with “female colleagues”.

Yeah, that’s right: they can’t see what’s in front of them, but it’s the humourless, lemon-sucking, hectoring “female artists, co-producers, authors” who have now stood up and spoilt their fun.

How about simply having principles, and sticking up for them? Honestly, lads, it’s easier.