Once again it seems that we students are out to get free speech. If you read certain newspapers or listen to certain politicians, you’d think that students want nothing more than to clamp down any form of dissent, or shield themselves from anything that might make them feel mildly uncomfortable.

The universities minister Jo Johnson is threatening to blacklist higher education institutions that do not ‘uphold free speech’, whatever that means, while according to a recent editorial in The Times, taxpayers’ money is being wasted “pandering to intellectual vulnerability when it should be building intellectual resilience.”

What utter rubbish. What Johnson’s plans, and the wider coverage of student issues in the media, actually reveal are not the corrosive effects of students wanting to shut down debate. Rather, it is that these issues are wholly misunderstood and misrepresented by groups who are determined to force the facts into the narrative they have already constructed.

Even when coverage of student politics is not as outwardly hostile, it still reveals a sense of general bewilderment. Distinct ideas such as no-platforming, preferred pronouns, micro-aggressions and content notes are are assimilated and lumped together under the vague notion of 'snowflakes', with students presented as either entirely in favour of, or bravely opposed to.

There is not the space to list all of the ways in which these ideas have been misrepresented, though it is worth pointing out a few. The idea that one person having their invitation to speak at one college’s feminist society amounts to a shutting down of free speech is ludicrous. There is nothing to stop them being hosted by another society in the university (and no doubt there would be one willing to have them), and it it not as if students will never come across the views espoused by this person.

Content notes are mischaracterised as allowing students to turn away from any ideas that make them feel mildly uncomfortable. The reality is that they are used incredibly sparingly, for those students who have had some kind of traumatic experience and may not want to re-live it in a lecture on a Monday morning.

What, though, can be done? Criticism from the press should not distract us from being inclusive and caring for each other. Patience will be required: if we want the wider media to take note, we must be tireless in explaining, reiterating, and remaking the case for all of these ideas