Don’t Expect Safe Spaces

Last updated on: September 3, 2016 at 7:00 am by Timothy Willard

Don’t Expect Safe Spaces 2016-09-01T23:20:56-04:00 Timothy Willard

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Earlier this summer I pinned an article from spiked! concerning “the Decolonise the Curriculum” campaign spreading in higher education. But some institutions are having none of it. University of Chicago’s open letter to incoming freshman is one example of the push for true academic freedom.

This post over at Acculturated notes just how insane the PC culture is getting:

Last semester, it seemed the PC Left had reached peak absurdity—and that the entire higher education system had caved to its demands. At Oberlin, students who protested bad banh mi sandwiches and General Tso’s chicken as being culturally insensitive were indulged with an apology from the college’s director of dining services. At Yale, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, the master and associate master of the school’s largest residential college, who dared suggest that students use their common sense when choosing Halloween costumes, resigned from their posts after university administrators stood by as a witch hunt ensued. At Rutgers, students were permitted to opt out of reading Virginia Woolf, lest her books trigger suicidal ideation. And so on, at campuses across the country.

You can read the Acculturated piece here.

See below for links to UoC’s open letter to incoming freshman.

SOURCE: University of Chicago’s Message to Freshman: Don’t Expect Safe Spaces

Looking for safe spaces on campus or trigger warnings on a syllabus?

Incoming students at the University of Chicago have been warned they won’t find either in Hyde Park.

They all received a letter recently from John Ellison, dean of students, which went beyond the usual platitudes of such letters and made several points about what he called one of Chicago’s “defining characteristics,” which he said was “our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” Ellison said civility and respect are “vital to all of us,” and people should never be harassed. But he added, “You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.”

To that end, he wrote, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

University of Chicago

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