If Oliver Cromwell's head were to pop up from the chapel floor at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it is reputed to be buried, the old puritan would be delighted at what he saw. At a time when a good proportion of the nation's youth can be found mooning on Facebook, there is still one group of young people who can purport to be shocked by the sight of nudity. Last week an undergraduate magazine, Vivid, was distributed to 5,000 students with, shock, horror, a topless photograph of a woman Homerton student. The result? General outrage.

“I can't believe she agreed to pose for the magazine,” said one distressed undergraduate. “I'm sure she really regrets it now.”

Or maybe she is just looking forward to making some money modelling without being accused of demeaning herself and women in general. It is an odd world in which members of the WI are happy to cash in from stripping off but undergraduates who attempt the same raise hackles from their peers.

But then students at our better universities have long had their Taleban tendency. I should know. I have offended a fair few people in print over the years, but none quite so spectacularly as the Cambridge University Students' Union - which deemed that a piece I wrote in the 1990 Alternative Prospectus so offensive that it arranged for the entire print run to be pulped.

Fortunately, I had been sent an advance copy, and so am able to remind myself of what caused the stir. Despite its rarity, I don't suspect that this faintly embarrassing collection of undergraduate scribblings is a great collectors' item.

But neither do I think that I will cause today's edition of The Times to be removed from the shelves if I quote the offending passage. Imploring freshers not to rush into bed with each other in the first week, I wrote: “You may find yourself intertwined in an endless chain of institutional incest that begins with the fresher with the largest mammary glands and ends who knows where?”

My only regret is that I hadn't written something worth banning. How can you make a hoo-hah about free speech after penning something as pathetic as that? It did teach me one thing, however: a degree of prudishness, in common with a distrust of authority and a brief dalliance with socialism, is a rite of passage for any educated person. Purporting to be offended when those around you do are not is, for many students, part of establishing intellectual superiority.

Any parents distressed at the sight of their offspring burning this term's Vivid should be reassured that it is usually only a passing phase.

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