BY LARRY HEDGE, EDUCATION REPORTER

THE FIRST BACHELOR OF MORAL OUTRAGE will graduate three years from now if online university Welt Erwache is successful in launching its latest degree course.

“Moral outrage has exploded in recent years,” according to the university’s chancellor Professor Josef Adolf. “You cannot turn your head without hearing someone or other screaming outrage at something. But it’s a subject that has had little academic scrutiny. Not any more. Our graduates will not only be able to scrutinize moral outrage, they will be able to define it. To date, it has so many practitioners that a cow farting in India provokes moral outrage in Dusseldorf. Or a paper written on feminism in the later years of the Western Roman Empire condemns pay scales between the sexes in modern rugby league. Then there’s all the subsets that moral outrage has – trans, gay, fat, left, climate, to name but a few. There are tribes in the South Pacific who only communicate in moral outrage, you know. Apparently, the tradition developed when a cruise ship carrying a racism conference ran aground on a small reef. The rise of the thin skinned and the endlessly offended is here. Nothing is beyond offence any more. Things that would not have raised an eyebrow a few decades ago can finish a career now. And it’s all supercharged by the internet. Fascinating, really. And mind what you say. Someone out there is just waiting to be offended. Outrageous!”