Oh, save us from scary ideas!
KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.
So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”
Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.
If these precious snowflakes need Play-doh and naps to cope with Other Viewpoints, send them back home and have them re-enroll in preschool.
Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer. […]
A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel “unsafe.”
Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.”
“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email.
The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it.
Feaure, not bug; as Leftists are convinced they, and only they, are the ultimate holders of All.That.is.Good.and.True.
Not only should dissenters be ignored, but should be expelled by any means necessary.
We have to stop funding this insanity. Yesterday.
Trade schools, apprenticeships, independent certification authorities, self-study. The sooner we decouple college degrees from employment opportunities, the better off we will be.
. . . [a] competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.
Care to speculate whether Boko Haram or ISIS or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or female genital mutilation will be discussed?
an answer to the proggtarded
Ted Cruz “Black listed & Loving it” T-Shirt
Casting Crowns – East to West
Casting Crowns – Set Me Free
cruz 2016
President Ronald Reagan – Liberty State Park [Pt. 1]
may feel good to the hypersensitive
Except for genuine rape and trauma victims, they’re not “hypersensitive,” they’re posing, and that’s what feels good.
Wait a sec, isn’t solipsism the result of never having one’s experieces invalidated? I thought the ideal of a college education was to broaden one’s mind, not narrow it.
I guess kids these days are to busy broadening each others orof–
If this is the deal, then Socratic maieutics takes on a re-newed urgency.
This is the kind of stuff that needs to be shouted about from the highest hilltops loudly and often.
“Hey America, these are the assclowns who are going to be running things soon, and your tax dollars are enabling a good deal of it. What do you think?”
These people are pathetic and imbecilic beyond words.
Universities are left-wing seminaries, only in a real seminary they at least study other theologies for comparison with their own.
It’s like Brave New World, except you never leave the hatcheries and conditioning centers.
Only one question about this Byron drone: Is she an Alpha or Beta?
[…] a The New York Times op-ed by Judith Shulevitz [tip of the fedora to Darleen Click, who has the link to the NYT — a rag I won't directly link […]
Conservative Christians should make similar complaints. Talk of abortion, infidelity, homosexuality etc as triggers.
I like your style, bgbear.
Conservative Christians should make similar complaints. Talk of abortion, infidelity, homosexuality etc as triggers.
Because the Left is always cowed when their double standards are exposed.
Bastille – Pompeii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F90Cw4l-8NY
@
199,812,787
on you tube
Hey! Who heard that this guy from Texas, Ted Cruz is his name, announced that he’s running for President? He seems to have some connecetion to the Tea Party, whatever the heck that is.
And who’s heard that he’s unelectable?
As the good professor said, “every leftist enclave eventually eats itself, and academia has become a leftist enclave.”
I suppose the real bottom line is that we’ve moved beyond the Closing of the American Mind. It’s not only shut, but now actively barricaded.
Don’t believe me? Just read the confused post that prompted Glenn Reynolds’s link in the first place.
Another relevant essay linked today by Instapundit:
The Wrong Time to Coddle
Speaking of real evils and dangers that are growing:
[…] Walter Russell Mead we get the unvarnished Truth of what lies ahead [tip of the fedora to Ernst Schreiber and […]