Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.
...Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response.
...According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.
...It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
...What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?
...It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years.
...What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?
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