What’s the point of a university? Regrettably, that’s a genuine question. The censorship and trigger warnings that are rife on British campuses make it hard to work out what our formerly esteemed institutions of higher education are for anymore, now that free speech, intellectual challenge and the pursuit of truth have become deeply unfashionable.

Hundreds of freedom-of-information requests were sent out by the Times to officials across 140 UK universities. The responses found that trigger warnings, telling students that certain works might be upsetting or even traumatising, have been applied to more than 1,000 texts. At least ten universities have even removed books from reading lists or made them optional out of concerns they might ‘harm’ students.

Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, was among the books affected. It was removed from an English course at the University of Essex over its ‘graphic description of violence and abuse of slavery’. Miss Julie, the classic play by August Strindberg, has been ‘permanently withdrawn’ from a literature module at the University of Sussex because it contains discussion of suicide.

Other texts have been made optional on account of their ‘challenging’ content. At Nottingham Trent, students of French no longer have to study Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine whose staff were gunned down by Islamists seven years ago. Why? Because academics decided the magazine was ‘racist, sexist, bigoted, (and) Islamophobic’.

Some of the trigger warnings slapped on books are downright comical. Aberdeen has put one on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for ‘classism’ and labelled Chaucer ‘emotionally challenging’. Not to be outdone, Greenwich warns students that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘contains self-injurious behaviour, suicide, animal cruelty’. But what about the whole totalitarianism thing?

Those who insist such measures are essential to looking after ‘vulnerable’ students haven’t been paying attention. Trigger warnings, as a therapeutic intervention to help those suffering genuine mental distress, are woefully misguided. There is no proper evidence that they work. And as a general tool in education, they’re a disaster: in effect they urge students not to read certain books and institutionalise the idea that students cannot deal with challenging material.

The books that are being dropped or covered in warnings are fascinating. Take the case of the University of Essex and The Underground Railroad, which was published in 2016. A contemporary book by an African-American author has been binned because his depiction of the horrors of slavery might upset some privileged English students. There is no better indication of how confused and unprogressive campus censorship is than that.

Naturally, academics are dismissing the investigation. They say that a few universities messing about with reading lists does not a free-speech crisis make, blithely ignoring the more than 1,000 trigger warnings that have been uncovered. They also turn a blind eye to official data showing a sharp rise in no-platforming on campus. Instead the backlash to these trigger warnings has been dismissed as a right-wing culture war.

This response by universities only underlines their critics’ point: that these once great seats of learning have become glorified crèches. Universities have completely lost sight of their founding principles. They now function, all but explicitly, as communities of the like-minded and as therapeutic spaces in which fragile souls can shelter from the supposed awfulness of the world. Opposing views are discouraged and students are spared the indignity of reading a ‘challenging’ book.

Without freedom of speech, without intellectual courage, you do not have a university. Those who run higher education desperately need to be reminded of that.