College should be a safe space for thought, not a safe space from thought

From Salman Rushdie On Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings: Speak Severely To People Who Want To Propagate This.

His first point is one that seems to get lost in the noise. I am reasonably confident that the cult of victimhood and identity are widespread but I also I suspect that they are very, very shallow. Regrettably, postmodernist, critical theory multiculturalist ideologies are reasonably entrenched among the professoriate, or at least within select departments and disciplines, though, interestingly not in departments where knowledge is subject to testability and the scientific method. I am near certain, however, that the violent advocates of coercive totalitarianism are only a tiny percent of the student body.

But their demands are so childish, bizarre and outrageous that they are compelling click bait for the news media (another institution infused with know-nothing postmodernists).

Rushdie:

"The antidote is to ignore it and to speak severely to people who want to propagate it," Rushdie said. "I have to say in my experience in the American academy which is now going on for 20 years I have never had a student say to me that he wanted a 'trigger warning' or she wanted a 'safe space.' I hear that it happens around the country. I have no personal experience with it so I don't know how much of it there is."

One would like to think that no contemporary snowflake would have the audacity to complain of needing safe spaces to a man who spent a couple of decades under a religious sentence of death for his literary writings, a real threat given that other authors and free thinkers were being assassinated. One would hope, but the children of postmodernism tend to lack knowledge, history, perspective or the sense of self-awareness and dignity which might preclude them from such embarrassing claims.

One of Rushdie's fellow panelists notes.

"I think what is missing is leadership," panelist Bret Stephens said. "I think too much of too many campus administrators are basically cowed by small minorities of totalitarian-minded students who just don't want to hear anything except what they're disposed to agree with. And the job of grown-ups is to behave like grown-ups and say no. Intellectually, a college is not a safe space. Intellectually, a college is a place where your ideas are harmed and perhaps even destroyed and that is how it should be."

Rushdie:

"College should be a safe space for thought, not a safe space from thought," Rushdie said. "And if you go to college and you never hear anything you haven't thought before then you may as well have stayed home."

"People who think they should never hear things that would upset them should go somewhere else and leave that space available to somebody who could benefit from what is called education."

That first observation reminds me or the fad back in the 1980s when people were being enjoined to be more open-minded. It always seemed to me that the people pushing this line were oblivious to the important distinction between being open-minded and being empty-minded.