Sheltered Students Go to College, Avoid Education

If you've reached that crotchety age I'm at, you may be as mystified as I am by the kids these days -- especially by how they're behaving on campus. I get the naive leftist politics and the wildly irresponsible partying; those things have been staples of student life for hundreds of years. I even understand the drive toward hamfisted censorship of views they don't like. After all, I did my coming-of-age at the University of Pennsylvania during the "spring from hell," when copies of the campus newspaper were stolen to protest perceived bias against minorities, and Eden Jacobowitz was famously brought up on racial harassment charges for screaming "shut up, you water buffalo1439403602363" out the window at a black sorority that was conducting a rather lively promenade down the walk below his dorm window.

What I don't understand is the tenor of the censorship. When I was in college, people who wanted to censor others were forthrightly moralistic, trying to silence "bad" speech. Today's students don't couch their demands in the language of morality, but in the jargon of safety. They don't want you to stop teaching books on difficult themes because those books are wrong, but because they're dangerous, and should not be approached without a trigger warning. They don't want to silence speakers because their ideas are evil, but because they represent a clear and present danger to the university community. If the school goes ahead and has the talk anyway, they build safe spaces so that people can cower from the scary speech together.