“Safe spaces” are a growing trend among college campuses all across America. The general idea centers around designated areas of a school in which students can shield themselves from activities or words that trigger anxiety and flashbacks to previously experienced trauma by segregating themselves from these things. This sounds like a good thing, right?
In theory, safe spaces would serve to be a sort of therapy for students with PTSD who are pushed over the edge; unfortunately, the cases in which students demand safe spaces are becoming more outrageous as time goes on. In multiple cases, this practice has already begun to affect the classroom and has shifted from a way to deal with emotions to a way of stifling any conversations that conflict with a student’s beliefs. Instead of bracing other viewpoints, these students are now demanding that public speakers who disagree with them be canceled from presenting at university events in order to spare their precious sensibilities. A simple argument, no matter how civil, can now be labeled “hate speech” simply because the student cannot defend their position and feels “threatened” by the opposing argument. Read more about these incidents here.
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I have heard many times from the older generation that modern college students are nothing but spoiled, delusional weaklings completely unable of adjusting to the real world around them. Is this truly what we’ve become? Have we regressed into nothing more than complainers paranoid of even hearing the words rape or racism?
To answer this, one must examine the point of college. People attend university to expand their mind, but you can only accomplish this by being receptive to new ideas and looking at situations through every angle. You cannot grow as an intellectual if you shrink away from opposing viewpoints and always surround yourself with people who agree with your narrow interpretation of the world. In fact, having your beliefs challenged only makes them stronger by forcing you to truly consider why you hold them in the first place.
By immersing yourself in an environment created to coddle adults and reject challenging ideas, you are cheating yourself out of the fundamental purpose of college; but what’s worse is when these groups spread their childlike mentalities across campus and ruin the college experience for everyone by canceling speakers and events that may “trigger” them.
The world is a vast and often unforgiving place filled to the brim with different opinions and beliefs. Safe spaces only serve to delude students into thinking they are prepared to enter into the real world, when in reality their college years have done nothing but mold them into intellectually inept complainers. If students are truly mentally incapacitated by debates in which their ideals are challenged, I suggest seeing a mental health professional to help cope, but don’t ask everyone around you to be silent in order to suit your whims, or you’ll find yourself sorely disappointed and unable to adjust when you graduate and embrace reality.
