If you can’t hear challenging ideas without a safe space, why are you even at college?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas

In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that, when a culture is in good shape, its condition will have much to do with the robust arguments conducted under its auspices about the good or the virtuous. An emphasis, there, on argument, that has always seemed to me compelling. I find it impossible to imagine a social order I would want to live in that isn’t built around a continuing, even interminable series of arguments. No doubt Yeats was right to warn, a century or so ago, that often in the modern world the best lack all conviction — you know how it goes — while only the worst are full of passionate intensity, so that the arguments, such as they are, will much of the time seem anything but edifying. And yet we do argue, and we want to be able to continue doing so as if things mattered — as if the tools at our disposal were sufficient to allow us to know, more or less, what we’re arguing about.

A friend of mine told me, not long ago, that passionate intensity was overrated, and conviction too. I knew what she meant. People with convictions are much of the time tedious. Moreover, they are intent upon achieving a grand consensus and, not incidentally, bringing everyone else to their knees. They want the rest of us to feel free to express ourselves, as they like to say, but only on the condition that we find them and their convictions irresistible and keep our mouths shut when we don’t. No surprise that passionate intensity seems often to belong most insistently to the commissars of correctness and their inflamed camp followers, who have as little use for real argument as they have for genuine difference or diversity.