A university should be a “safe space” – for free speech, for challenging dogmas and assumptions, for putting forward innovative ideas, for robust debate, for discovery, for intellectual courage. It should not be a safe space for preserving the timidities and assurances of pre-university childhood and adolescence.
Yet that is what university students on many American campuses now demand. They want to be warned in advance if course material contains references to subjects that could distress them. They want to be exempted from reading texts that touch on such matters as sexual abuse, divorce and suicide – which immediately puts Thomas Hardy, F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf off the syllabus. It has even happened that professors have been driven from their jobs by students accusing them of being insufficiently “politically correct”.
On some campuses, students have set aside “safe spaces” with cuddly toys and puppy videos where those stressed by uncomfortable topics can avoid them. The atmosphere of hypersensitive inability to handle challenging ideas invites caricature: today’s American students, it seems, want mollycoddling and reassurance, not education; they want security, not intellectual and personal growth. And what happens in America is too soon copied elsewhere – including in Britain. Read on and comment » | AC Grayling, Master of New College of the Humanities in London | Friday, December 4, 2015
