Cry wolf: Cambridge terrified by Little Red Riding Hood

These days, there are many fairy tales – some more tragic than others – emerging from the University of Cambridge. In the sanitised forest of contemporary academia, even the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood is placed under quarantine. No longer a mysterious predator, no longer the embodiment of the voracity that for centuries has dramatised the precariousness of childhood and the allure of danger, but simply ‘adult content’ to be flagged with the hygienic label of a trigger warning. Cambridge, which once nurtured minds capable of tackling Aeschylus without flinching and Shakespeare without asking permission, now includes a safety warning in a lecture on a Grimm Brothers’ tale, as if one were to teach students to recognise discomfort even before teaching them to think. The university has censored the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale due to the ‘themes of violence’ it contains.

The notice was sent to students ahead of a lecture offered to state school pupils to prepare them for university studies at the prestigious British university, particularly in the humanities. The official course notes state: “Content warning – this session involves the discussion of certain adult content, including themes of violence, with reference to fairy tales”. When the ‘old Chinese man’ in "The Shepherdess" and Hans Christian Andersen’s chimney sweep were changed to ‘an old man’ in an American edition by Chronicle Books, Glyn Jones – the foremost expert on Danish literature – severed all ties with the American publisher after being asked to alter the ending of "The Little Match Girl" ‘to make the story happier’. Now, in Cambridge, Little Red Riding Hood is treated with the same caution as the labelling of a medicine.

A new production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at London’s famous Globe Theatre – yes, the very one where the Bard himself performed – is set to open this autumn with a warning: “This production contains depictions of war, suicide and violence”. Cambridge had already posted warnings on lectures covering a wide range of classical texts. Such as the lecture on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”, which is said to contain “sexual violence and sexual assault” (Newsweek aptly headlined it “Shakespeare for Snowflakes”, referring to the students as snowflakes). A warning has also been issued at Cambridge for the lecture on "The Bacchae" by the Greek playwright Euripides, which features scenes of women tearing livestock and human beings to pieces. Offensive, certainly, but less so than the lecture at Cambridge where Winston Churchill was described as "worse than the Nazis", a white supremacist of the worst kind.

Meanwhile, at the very same university rocked by the Jason Arday case, doctorates are now being awarded without a second thought (and professorships prepared) in ‘traditional cultural norms and gender relations in Ghana’, ‘the political economy of female circumcision’ and ‘the legal mobilisation of Black lesbian, bisexual and queer womxn in Kenya and South Africa’. The university that was once a great intellectual training ground has been transformed into a mental health clinic, and great literature into a museum of dangerous artefacts to be visited only whilst wearing a mask and accompanied by an authorised guide. Perhaps there should be a warning about choosing Cambridge as a place of study.