BRITAIN is in a flap about manners.

Etiquette experts are arguing over the acceptability of serving takeaway food to dinner guests, and one august Italian institution has declared the practice "shallow and gross". Meanwhile, there is widespread unease about the lack of common courtesy in our culture.

Not everyone will share the Accademia Italiana Galateo's outrage about dinner-party kebabs, but it's hard to disagree that common decency is lacking in parts of Scottish society. As we reveal today, sexist behaviour is rife in our universities with female students reporting that slurs, boorish innuendo and sexual harassment are commonplace.

Complacently, we may have assumed that chauvinism in academia was a thing of the past. The majority of university students are now female and more women than men are gaining degrees in once-male-dominated subjects such as law and medicine. Yet as the shocking treatment of young debaters in the Glasgow University Union (GUU) confirms, some male students still think they are living in the dark ages of sexual inequality.

Some have blamed websites for the burgeoning of lad culture but wherever it stems from, the result is an oppressive climate of misogyny which is harmful to women's development, and could even put them at risk of sexual assault. Allowing it to fester normalises an attitude that reduces women to sexual objects.

Bad manners? Those young GUU boors are guilty of rampant misogyny, and unless they are disabused of the notion that their behaviour is acceptable, they may go on to repeat it in the businesses and public services where they find employment.

That the GUU debacle has been reported around the world is an embarrassment to Scotland. That bright young women are being insulted and abused is an affront to us all. University leaders need to take urgent steps to ensure that their institutions are safe places for all students – and that prejudice and bigotry are not on their curriculums.