Academia has given us so much for which not to be grateful — identity politics, race/gender studies and sundry unpleasantries. But it has topped itself now with one even better — the right to be treated as something quite fragile, always endangered and almost too precious to live.
Last December, the Boston Globe informed us that “students at Harvard Law School, joining their counterparts at a pair of other leading universities, have asked that final exams be postponed for students who have been ‘traumatized’ by recent grand jury decisions” in New York and Missouri, explaining “we cannot walk away from our pain.” In England, some female students suggested we move from clapping to hand waving to signal approval, as the sound of applause could be threatening.
Others pushed for “trigger alerts” on reading assignments containing unpleasant scenes (such as ‘Macbeth’, for example?) so that sensitive souls could steel themselves, or else avoid them completely. According to one story mentioned in the Harvard Law Review (sparsely sourced, admittedly), a male student at a small school in Oregon “was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job and educational opportunity)…because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away.”
Perhaps the girl should leave school and enroll in “Preschool Mastermind,” described as “pre-K for adults” which is run Tuesday nights from a duplex in Brooklyn. It offers its students a return to the pleasures of life in the nursery, with show-and-tell, nap time and snacks.
This idea is akin to the ‘safe spaces’ established at Brown University, described by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times as designed “to give people who might find comments ‘troubling’ or ‘triggering’ a place to recuperate…equipped with cookies, coloring books…Play-Doh…pillows and blankets….as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” This is for students such as one Emma Hall, who felt driven to flee the debate she was watching “feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”
The horror. With this in the air, it is no surprise whatever that one John West, an ex- model and free-lance political activist, felt driven to create a virtual safe space for Hillary Clinton by emailing 120 or so political journalists that “we will be watching, reading, listening,and protesting ‘coded sexism.'” The sexist code-language about Hillary, he wrote, includes words such as “polarizing,” “calculating,” “disingenuous,” “ambitious,” “inevitable” and “insincere.”
Naturally, there is no sexist connotation at all to all of these words, which are routinely used to describe male politicians of every kind. Another problem is that “safe rooms,” already out of place in a college environment which is supposed to include free and open discussions of everything, are even less appropriate in the context of politics. Elections and even the act of legislating frequently resemble a mud-slinging slug-fest. Candidates are required to hear and respond to adverse comments regarding their own personal lives and their positions in events better known as “debates.” Should we expect candidate Clinton to feel the need to flee to a “safe room” if things became fractious?
We shall see, but it would bode well neither for her campaign nor her potential presidency. In a piece called “The Wrong Time to Coddle,” Walter Russell Mead warns that the “safe space” approach is producing a generation too soft to deal with the world that awaits it. Would President Clinton deal with Iran or with Russia in a room filled with Play-Doh? Someone should think this thing out, hard.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
