Before approving student events, the University of Florida asks campus organizations to evaluate the “emotional risk” a potential event could pose.
According to Young America’s Foundation (my previous employer), the event permit application student organizations are required to complete, hosted on the university’s online portal GatorConnect, includes a subsection titled “Emotional Risk” that asks students to “select all possibilities of Emotional Risk that may apply to your event.” The options include “Sensitive Subject Matter,” “Reaction of Participants,” and “Potential Controversy.”
The university’s office of Student Activities and Involvement assigns each risk factor “a point value” which are “tallied to identify if the event will need an SAI staff presence.”
Controversy over campus events featuring conservative speakers rocked higher education last year and it’s easy to imagine this process is designed to justify greater university control over lectures and events with the potential to irritate progressive campus activists. It’s also easy to imagine the requested assessment of “emotional risk” comes in response to the concerns of a generation of college students who claim to be impacted psychologically by ideas with which they disagree and believe they should be sheltered from them.
Speakers like Christina Hoff Sommers — who dares to challenge the feminist misinformation on, for instance, campus rape statistics — are subject to censorship efforts by students who claim to made unsafe by her lectures.
University of Florida students, of course, can and should skip over this section with ease. There is no reason to spend much time complaining about it. But as an example of how universities condition students to cope with challenges, Florida’s decision to validate their complaints of “emotional risk” in a formal application process is worth remembering.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
