This is from yet another article on the increasingly helicoptering role that people are trying to force colleges to assume:
Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.
The private is gushing out into the public space, colonizing it and destroying all of the remnants of what used to be a robust public sphere. The public, the political, the intellectual is constantly presented as dangerous and encroaching on the private, the personal, and the emotional.
The reality, however, is different.
Public spaces are forced to restructure themselves in a way that will make them as similar as possible to families.
Political activism is substituted with pop-psych rhetoric.
Colleges are told to protect helpless and emotionally damaged children instead of educating adults.
It’s easier to find a space to emote than to debate.
The linked article fixates on colleges, refusing to see that they are just a tiny little part of a much larger phenomenon. I guess it’s easier to emote about hypersensitive kids than to look at how one contributes to the colonization of the public by the private. It is as if these kids came to college from a different planet instead of being brought up by the same adults who are complaining about their hypersensitivity.
Clarissa's Blog 
This reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s comment that there is no society but only individuals and families. The general consensus among politicians including Rauner and Obama is that education is job training which doesn’t allow for uncomfortable thoughts required for critical thinking and is a subset of the neo-Liberal Homo Laborans. I wonder if any of these folks have read “The Human Condition” by Hannah Arendt.
LikeLike
One of students in question commented:
“Standing up against something that one deems unjust or wrong does not hinder academic discourse or intellectual discussions. In fact, it promotes them. It demonstrates the controversy first-hand. Students asking for trigger warnings and safe spaces do not want to suppress free speech or stop material from being covered in the classroom. They are asking for respect and consideration–conducive and necessary for productive conversation, especially when discussing a contentious subject. That has nothing to do with what material and subjects can or cannot be covered in a classroom. That’s up to the discretion of the dean or professor.
When I carried a mattress across campus, I wanted my school’s administrators to strictly enforce Title IX and implement certain rights for sexual assault survivors. Survivors deserve to feel safe and supported by their school. According to Schulevitz, I don’t want to hear the other side of it. But, I do–I think the biggest problem is that we don’t have these conversations inside a classroom. Because it’s taboo to talk about in an academic setting, we are still arguing whether sexual assault is an issue, or whether rape culture exists.
What’s happening with our classrooms is not the fault of student protestors claiming they feel unsafe, or students asking for trigger warnings or safe spaces. Mixing the two together is a great logical fallacy. The two are irrelevant.”
LikeLike
Two comments:
1) I found myself agreeing with the following:
“Safe spaces aren’t about hiding. The point of a safe space (as illustrated by the example provided during the rape culture debate) is to help students attend a debate or discuss an issue they might otherwise avoid due to past trauma.”
Your point may be true, but correct use of safe places can also contribute to debate. We should distinguish between hiding from discomfiting viewpoints and safe places helping people with PTSD to participate in potentially triggering discussions in the public sphere. As long as everybody understands that the discussion room is not a safe place by definition and shouldn’t be turned into one by force, everything is fine.
2) Apperantly, it isn’t an entirely new phenomenon:
// Ms Shulevitz is describing nothing more than a resurgence under different colors of the so-called “politically correct” campus movements of the 1980s and 1990s. I was a graduate student in those years and well remember the authoritarian demands for anti-intellectual “re-education” of faculty, hate-speech codes, equity-office sensitivity training, and other such nonsense that sloshed over campuses in a tsunami of bilge.
I was (and am) a very left wing liberal but in those days I found myself in agreement with conservative critics.
LikeLike
And then they go into the workplace and freak out over somebody looking at them the wrong way or not praising them exuberantly enough for everything they do (real stories.)
LikeLike
I seem to remember stories of helicopter parents slowing intruding into the job interview process, from waiting outside in the car, to waiting with their kids inside until the interview and then finally going into the interview with the kids.
It took me a long time to realize what that reminded me of, which is pre-industrial arranged marriages (and still common in lots of the world) where young people might have a chance or two to talk for a few minutes under the gaze of chaperones before deciding whether to commit to each other for the rest of their lives.
I don’t know why I thought to share that now, but it seems appropriate now.
LikeLike
Ha! Except that there’s an inside chance the kidlets won’t be at the same job or even at the same company within five years. And with those marriages you speak of, it’s super taboo to get divorced because it’s more like a corporate merger ceremony (“our families are getting married”), and half of their family and your family shows up to the meeting.
LikeLike
“Except that there’s an inside chance the kidlets won’t be at the same job or even at the same company within five years.”
LikeLike
Maybe the mattress stunt gets so much play in the media because it makes relationships look frightening and dangerous?
I recall reading (don’t know how accurate this is) that the emphasis on the nuclear, rather than traditional extended, family in the west is because smaller units are easier to move around when necessary. No unit is as easy to move around as an individual with no inclination to pair bond…
People who’ve lived in Houston and Berlin both told me that those cities seem to be mostly made up of single people, so maybe that’s the future.
LikeLike
“Maybe the mattress stunt gets so much play in the media because it makes relationships look frightening and dangerous? I recall reading (don’t know how accurate this is) that the emphasis on the nuclear, rather than traditional extended, family in the west is because smaller units are easier to move around when necessary. No unit is as easy to move around as an individual with no inclination to pair bond…”
LikeLike
There was an old feminist slogan that “the personal is political.” A lot of this is the unintended consequences of this line of thought.
LikeLike
Little did they know that, one day, the slogan would change to “There is nothing but personal in the political.”
LikeLike