Commentary
One of the very few valuable institutions created in Britain in the last half-century or so was the Open University. This allowed people who had cut short their education, for whatever reason, to attain a university degree over four or five years by correspondence course and a few weeks’ attendance every year at face-to-face teaching by academic staff as near as possible to their homes.
The standard was extremely high: higher, indeed, than in many other universities. The requirements were rigorous and demanded that students devote almost all their spare time to study. The Open University for long resisted the decline in academic standards elsewhere and the fashionable nonsense that did so much to bring it about. But now the Open University has capitulated to the zeitgeist: It has issued trigger warnings to students of its English literature course, including about such works as “Hamlet.”…