Pushing boundaries has been exchanged for “safe space.”

Megan McArdle writes at the New York Post:

Behind college kids’ rising demands for censorship

When I was in college, people who wanted to censor others were forthrightly moralistic, trying to silence “bad” speech. Today’s students don’t couch their demands in the language of morality, but in the jargon of safety.

During the time when people are supposed to be learning to face an often-hard world as adults, and going through the often-uncomfortable process of building their intellectual foundations, they are demanding to be sheltered from anything that might challenge their beliefs or recall unpleasant facts to their mind.

And increasingly, colleges are accommodating them. Everything at college is now supposed to be sanitized to the point of inoffensiveness — not only the course work, but even the comedians who are invited to entertain the students.

The obvious objection to this is that it’s not possible to have a community of ideas in which no one is ever offended or upset.

The less obvious, but even more important, objection is raised by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in this month’s Atlantic: It’s bad for the students themselves.