In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas

March 22, 2015 12:24 PM

"You’d be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn’t see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space."

Judith Schulevitz considers free speech and safe spaces in today's universities.
posted by crazy with stars (5 comments total)

Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

I don't like when people use strong-sounding phrases like "it follows" for issues that are well outside the scope of deductive reasoning. One car on the Amtrak is designated as the quiet car, and I guess to some extent that implies that the rest of the cars are noisy, but it doesn't follow that all the cars should be made quieter. On the contrary, the whole reason for designating a specific quiet car is the recognition that the world is, for the most part, a noisy place, and that it's neither reasonable nor realistic to expect everyone in every car to be quiet all the time.
posted by escabeche at 12:30 PM on March 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

“I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

Beautiful!
posted by jason's_planet at 12:31 PM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nor do we sneer at people who choose to sit in the quiet car. Rather, we assume they have a good reason for sitting there. We don't think of them as moral babies or delicate flowers who can't handle the real world. Maybe they have a work deadline. Maybe they have a headache. Maybe they just want an hour's break from listening to the beat leaking out of every pair of headphones, the same beat in every car, the same beat every day.
posted by escabeche at 12:35 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

This piece was very shallow and reductive. There's a meaningful difference between wanting to be protected from political opinions and wanting to be protected from opinions like "you were asking to be raped".
posted by dialetheia at 12:37 PM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Complaining that someone who works as a sexual assault counselor is hiding her head in the sand about the reality of rape is nasty stupidity.

Also, didn't Chait just write this same article? With the same examples?
posted by jaguar at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]