Trigger warning: You might find this column offensive.
Well, probably not. Goodness knows, I have written more offensive things in the past. And while people occasionally get their nose tweaked or their dander up, nobody has died or suffered permanent injury. So far as we know.
Yet, while we all occasionally are subjected to things we might find offensive — guess what, snowflakes, the world can be a bumpy place — for some reason this has become a cause c?l?bre on the nation’s campuses. For some reason, the culture of being offended has reached offensive levels with the discussion of safe spaces and microaggressions and trigger warnings.
On one side, there is the dean of students at the University of Chicago, one of the nation’s great educational institutions, sending out a letter to incoming students saying the school does not support “so-called trigger warnings” or “intellectual safe spaces.” On the other, there is the president of Northwestern University, an even greater institution (OK, I’m biased; it’s my alma mater) retorting that those who regard safe spaces as coddling are “lunatics” and that those who deny the existence of microaggressions are “idiots.”
Lunatics? Idiots? That hurts my feelings.
Anyway, all of this is a discussion worth having, yet one that has been completely obfuscated by the bluster. In the interest of intellectual curiosity, I asked my daughter, a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, about the climate on her campus. “Well, I’ve never heard any mention of a safe space or trigger warnings, so I guess that means we don’t have them,” she replied. She also sent me a campus bulletin stressing that dynamic education “can only be accomplished when freedom of expression is unambiguously protected and promoted.”
