There have been a lot of stories recently about no-platforming at universities, with free speech and academic intolerance becoming much more of an issue. Last week journalist Julie Bindel was disinvited by Manchester’s Student Union because of something she wrote about a decade ago, since when she has been hounded continuously. Bindel has been disinvited to events so many times now her name could almost be a verb; to bindel someone. Readers will recall that the Catholic Herald’s Tim Stanley was prevented from speaking at an Oxford debate on the subject "This House Believes Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts Us All". Again, the argument was that it would somehow harm the students’ safety to listen to someone with a different point of view. Tim, however, is something of an exception, for the interesting thing about no-platforming is that most of the people barred are women, and most of them are on the Left. The former is an interesting question but for another time, but the latter is most likely because conservatism is an irrelevancy. Trans activists forcing Bindel out of a debate is the equivalent of the Jacobins turning on the Girondins after the revolution has been won; as for today’s conservatives, they’re in a coffee shop in London hanging out with Le Comte de Frou Frou. No one no-platforms them – except when an ultra-personal issue like abortion is involved – because no one cares what we think. It wasn’t always like this. As this interview with the great Roger Scruton recalls, "in 1985, the University of Glasgow's Philosophy Department boycotted a paper that Scruton had been invited to present on campus. Scruton recalls how, that same day, academics elsewhere in the university were conferring an honorary degree on Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe." Have today’s students even read Scruton? The main cause of this declining tolerance in academia was laid out recently by the ‘Heterodox Academy’, a new campaign by about 20 academics in the US aimed at increasing political diversity in universities (among those involved are Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt). In one post April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College spells out how the monopoly of ideas by the liberal-Left has led to the rise of intolerance. She writes: