College campuses aren't supposed to be intellectually safe. They need to be intellectually dangerous

[TalkingDog]

What we also don't need, again, are excessive "safe zones" -- which are, in effect, a retreat from the battlefield of ideas. Anybody who wishes to make a college campus "a home" -- like that misguided, obscenity spewing student at Yale -- needs to know that the best home for ideas is a messy one, a non-stop Thanksgiving feast of family members who love one another but quarrel constantly, over matters great and small. Anyone who doesn't think that college is about "creating an intellectual space" needs to get out and make room for a deserving kid who actually wants an education.

The folks who want to shut down campus newspapers and create "safe spaces" have been tagged "liberals." Maybe so, but what they are doing is completely antithetical to a real progressive movement that seeks both social justice and personal freedom. In a time of rampant inequality and corporate hegemony in America, we need a revolution -- and we need to be producing "street fighters" of ideas, not coddled retreaters to their intellectually spotless "home." For America to someday be the great nation it can truly be requires intellectually dangerous spaces, not safe ones.

Off campus, you're not going to be dealing with wishy-washy emailing professors or 19-year-olds wanting to shoot some video for the college newspaper, but actual determined enemies -- racist and reactionary bozos and heartless billionaires who'll ship your job overseas before they give you a raise from $8 an hour, and deport your parents just for the hell of it. And when these bad guys fight back, and they will, trust me -- you're not going to want a safe space. You're going to want the whole world watching.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/College-campuses-arent-supposed-to-be-intellectually-safe-They-need-to-be-intellectually-dangerous.html#cMuVcU0tYxPEiq0m.01

[antigop]

1. wow. Thanks for that. nt

[deutsey]

2. At Yale, a student reportedly wrote this about the Halloween email debacle:

"I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.”

Really?

Whether you agree or disagree with the email, if you've read it you have to have very poor comprehension skills if you took it as an assault of some sort on your "safe space."

I shudder to think how these students would've fared back in the '80s when I was in college. Talk about not having a safe space. As a politically liberal student from a working-class background going to college in the Reagan era, believe me, there was nothing of the sort on campus for people like me.

[geek tragedy]

3. "I don't want to debate. I just want to talk about my pain."

Two most revealing sentences in any of this.

It takes on shades of the French revolution, wherein the enemy isn't the plutocrats or racist demagogues, but groups such as "white feminists" (that term is used as an epithet).

[TalkingDog]

5. Yep. The liberal dream is the liberal nightmare.

n/t

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

4. University of Illinois canned a new hire because...

His posts were intellectually controversial.

U. of Illinois to Pay $875K Settlement to Steven Salaita After Firing Him for Tweets About Gaza

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/11/12/u_of_illinois_to_pay_875k

[bvf]

6. K&R. n/t