August was known as the ‘silly season’ in the media because little happened and stories needed to be made up to fill space. No more. There are energy and cost of living crisis, wars and a Tory leadership battle
The Murdoch Times has however stuck with tradition and its front page lead on 10th August was about an alleged cull of University reading lists. The paper sent out 300 Freedom of Information requests to University authorities. The aim was to find out if books had been dropped on the grounds of political correctness. Two responses (out of three hundred) responded that a couple of texts were no longer mandated reading but still on lists.
In an Editorial the Times changed tack slightly and said the concern was that larger numbers of books had trigger warnings alerting students to problematic content. Or to put it another way reading lists had a brief summary of what books were about.
In my undergraduate days it was a point of principle not to read books on set reading lists (but read around the subject).Judging by the comments of Liz Truss’s University tutor in the Sunday Times she did the same. Was it our comprehensive school education?
Perhaps times have changed or perhaps the Times was being extremely silly. Indeed it reports that a response of several academics to its FOIs was ‘fuck off’
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