University of Chicago Tells Incoming Students: Don't Expect Safe Spaces or Trigger Warnings

[haele]

71. The warning is not for the bored little snowflakes, it's for people who have been abused.

For it to be a trigger warning, that means that it is going to trigger PTSD, or rage/fear/suicidal impulses enough to make you want to quit the class before your reactions cause a complete disintegration of self or harm to others.

Trigger warnings are not there because they might challenge you to question the social barriers mummy and daddy, or church, put in your brains, or they might might challenge you to step outside your personal world view and consider third world problems instead of your first world problems.

However, they are used to legally protect the institution and the instructor from neurotics raised by self-absorbed helicopter parents and other youth who just don't want to consider that there is a world outside their ass-upmtions.

Same with "safe spaces" that are around the institution, but not part of the learning experience. Realistically, the classroom should be safe from violence or disrespect directed towards an individual student. But not for a student to avoid evidence and descriptions of actual harsh reality, privilege, and cultural brutality.
If students need a "safe" place where they can gather, blow off steam, and feel safe exploring their personal ideologies amongst like minded students or students with similar life experiences, that's what campus clubs and student organizations are for.

Including clubs or organizations that are bigoted or small minded. So long as there's no effort to promote any action that actually harms, harasses or promotes bad behavior in other students - there can be no reason like-minded individuals can't create their own safe spaces.

IME, Bigots get bored and turn on each other very quickly when they're not allowed to impact on people outside their own little cliques. They need victims. So let them have their short-lived safe spaces along with everyone else to keep an eye on them - just enforce the standard academic rules that require they treat other students with respect, and that they have to show that they can actually produce proper arguments.

I've seen more than one small-world conservative or bigot realize they've been lied to for most of their lives, and their so-called friends are close-minded idiots going nowhere fast once they learn something of the way the universe actually operates.

Haele