Students gather inside Nassau Hall during a sit-in, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Princeton, N.J. The protesters from a group called the Black Justice League, who staged a sit-in inside university President Christopher Eisgruber’s office on Tuesday, demand the school remove the name of former school president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from programs and buildings over what they said was his racist legacy. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
“In politics,” said Nietzsche, “the professor plays the comic role.”
There was a time, on American college campuses, when this may have been true. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, American academics were, indeed, like clowns – tenured radicals who fed their students a daily diet of Marxist theory, political activism, and lectures on social justice. Much akin to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, college professors led the way while unwary students followed lockstep behind.
The study of the disciplines that shaped the mind and character of statesmen like John Adams and James Madison — classics, philosophy, literature, and the core sciences — gave way to the study of gender issues and critical race theory and to students wasting their days partaking in meaningless protests, hunger strikes, and sit-ins.
For decades, faculty on American college campuses engendered a culture of intellectual conformity, monolithic political groupthink, and manufactured social crises. And yet, today, they react with surprise when their students demand that universities create “safe spaces,” where they can avoid hearing any views that challenge their own.
Where once “political correctness” on college campuses seemed amusing, today there is little to find comical.
Rather than encourage civilized discussion and the art of compromise, “safe spaces” erect their own atmosphere of intolerance and bigotry. They admit no dissent and shield naïve students from the actualities of this troubled world.
Students have become, in the words of noted civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz, “tyrannical.” Yet, Missouri, Yale, and Princeton (to name a few), have acquiesced to the temper tantrums of students demanding freedom from opposition.
For instance, at Princeton, a group of students occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office until he capitulated to several demands, including formal consideration that the university (1) scrub Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public and international affairs, (2) establish “safe spaces” for African-American students, including segregated dorms, and (3) mandate that all students and faculty take “cultural competency” classes. At the heart of their boisterous demands was that Princeton become a “safe space” for all students, the real goal of which is to create a “safe space” for an entitled few.
Such places are far from “safe”, as they extinguish debate, intimidate dissent, and destroy dialogue. Ultimately, the proliferation of safe spaces on college campuses serves to delude the next generation of leaders into thinking that safety exists in our troubled world.
By hiding students from intellectual discomfort– sometimes with violent results – and by further failing to teach critical thinking and self-discipline, America’s academic establishment has betrayed the very principles of liberal thinking and academic freedom it otherwise claims as inviolable.
What good is knowledge if it is wielded by persons incapacitated by self-indulgence? By sheltering smart, yet arrogant, students from the possibility that they might not know everything, so-called safe spaces reinforce the idea that ignorance deserves respect.
Further, safe spaces create a dysfunctional social order that dissolves neighborly bonds and eschews the notion of diversity. In many respects “safe spaces” recall the Jim Crow ideal of “separate but equal,” and particularly so when students demand single-race living accommodations.
When universities endorse such close-minded intolerance, the lesson taught is that dissent, and genuine diversity, are not to be tolerated. And, when thin-skinned students shout down guest lecturers and visiting public figures with whom they disagree, how do we expect them to respond to a neighbor who sticks a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio sign on his front lawn?
Higher education means nothing if it caters to the subjective desires and political appetites of teenagers and 20-somethings. Universities embrace safe spaces at their own peril, as such concepts are anathema to liberal learning and belie the very foundations upon which higher education is premised. In contrast, if universities are to do their job and prepare students both intellectually and personally to contribute to the world, they should start by teaching the lesson that the fantasy of a “safe space” is a fraud upon their pupils and the society they will one day lead.
Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York.
Students gather inside Nassau Hall during a sit-in, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Princeton, N.J. The protesters from a group called the Black Justice League, who staged a sit-in inside university President Christopher Eisgruber’s office on Tuesday, demand the school remove the name of former school president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from programs and buildings over what they said was his racist legacy. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) 
