Considering a disturbing recent survey of college students showing negligible support for what First Amendment protections really mean, and after nearly a decade of campus foolishness along similar lines, some words to the unwise might be efficient.
So here’s some advice for high school seniors, college students, and workers in their early 20s.
GEN Z IS SWIPING LEFT ON ROMANCE
If you feel you need someone else to protect you from so-called microaggressions, the problem is yours, not the microaggressor’s. If the perceived “aggression” is only “micro,” another name for it is “day-to-day life.” Adults learn how to deal with such things without drama.
If something “triggers” you, the problem is yours. Unless you are a gun, you shouldn’t even have a trigger, much less let it be pulled. See above about how real adults act.
All places should be safe from violence or deliberate harassment, but nobody should need a “safe space” for protection from ideas or debate. In fact, college campuses especially should be safe for all speech that isn’t criminally threatening (which is a high bar), not from speech that is unwanted or even emotionally challenging. If you are not at college to be challenged by different ideas, you don’t belong at college in the first place. And if you’re not in college, welcome to the real world, where nobody even dreams of giving you a space “safe” from ideas that might upset you. Come to think of it, some young professionals need to learn the same thing, and so do some censorious journalists.
If you want the First Amendment to protect only speech that doesn’t offend you, then you’ll find it’s not a protection at all but a cudgel for a power struggle — and one day, you’ll be on the losing side of the struggle, and you will not be allowed to speak. The rights to speak freely, express faith without fear of reprisal, publish anything not libelous or physically threatening, assemble (without trespassing), and petition one’s government are absolute requirements for a people to be free. Deny those rights to others, and you risk becoming little better than a slave yourself.
The goal of learning should not be “identity” but humanity. If you associate character traits with ethnicity, you are a bigot. This entails that there is no such thing as “whiteness” unless you are choosing a paint color somewhere between white and yellow. “Diversity” is a worthless shibboleth if it refers only to externalities such as race or “gender” but not opinion or expression — and if you force someone to publicly ascribe to “diversity,” you’ve just irretrievably contradicted yourself. “Inclusion” is nonsense if it excludes disfavored perspectives. Finally, if you want to segregate living arrangements or social structures, you are a segregationist and a friend of Jim Crow.
If you need someone in authority to provide “de-stressors” to help you cope with college exams, you have already flunked the test of maturity. In most jobs in the, ahem, “real world,” almost every day is the equivalent of a college exam. Suck it up, buttercup.
Colleges should inculcate — and genuinely good citizenship requires — emotional resilience and open minds. If hypersensitivity or brittleness, along with insistence on intellectual orthodoxy, is more your style, you’re doing it wrong.
