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It's 2017. Universities should be a safe space for students of all cultures, creeds, gender identities, sexualities, nationalities, economic backgrounds, or other intersectional marginalized categorizations. This is not the case.

What more should Universities, and especially the faculty, do to preserve Universities as safe spaces and as open and inclusive environments?

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    I voted to close this because it is clearly not a serious question asked in good faith, but just a way for you to express your opinion about higher education. See the help center.
    – ff524
    Oct 25, 2017 at 16:05

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Your fundamental premise is flawed. Universities are not a place to shield people from things that exist in the world. They are a place to learn what is in the world and how to face those things successfully. You do that through exposure, understanding and discussion. People at college age are still learning what they believe, and that process is significantly retarded if their beliefs aren't challenged.

Safe spaces are themselves the bad idea. They prevent young people from learning how to take responsibility for their own well-being at a critical time in their transition to adulthood. Universities should do less to infantilize their students, not more.

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    The philosophy that has grown out of intersectionality is divisive and conflicts directly with the self-responsibility core to adulthood. The idea that speech is not violence is the premise underlying the difference between civilized society and barbarism. It allows us to talk through our differences rather than going straight to killing each other like animals. The very few people who are actually "triggered" by speech either due to mental illness or unhealed mental trauma should absolutely seek counseling where they will be exposed to amounts they can handle so they can recover.
    – TheAtomicOption
    Oct 25, 2017 at 16:24
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    You can't expect students to effectively oppose proven bad ideas such as Nazi Fascism or Stalinist Communism unless they face them. They have to learn what those things are, and through discussion and argument, learn to express why they disagree without physically hurting people. If you shield them completely from the ideas, they won't know their ideological enemy and will have no defenses when those same ideas come back with a different name tag.
    – TheAtomicOption
    Oct 25, 2017 at 16:35
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    Another proximate cause is that the social science departments driving these ideas are ridiculously politically biased (I've seen ratios from 40:1 to over 267:1) and have in practice rejected the Enlightenment philosophy foundational to science. The goals have shifted ideas from inquiry to a positive feedback loop of activists creating activists to push their ideas and stomp out disagreement by any means. Yet another proximate cause is the cumulative effect of the fact that politics and temperament have strong correlations, so many balancing personality types have become wholly excluded.
    – TheAtomicOption
    Oct 25, 2017 at 18:22
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    You sound like you're against fair and even discourse. You want uneven, unfair discourse?? What then when your ideological opponents came into control of the discourse (as often happens)? If you don't believe your ideas will win when the discourse is fair and even, why should anyone think those ideas have merit? Letting the population decide is what's supposed to happen. It's one of the goals. It's how individuals agree to create society rather than fight. And it's not "a luxury" for anyone--convincing even a few takes a lot of effort.
    – TheAtomicOption
    Oct 25, 2017 at 23:12
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    The idea of "hate speech" impossibly requires listeners to first accurately ascertain and then cooperatively agree on the speaker's primary internal motivation. It's an amorphous standard with no basis in publicly available fact. That's why it's a bad measure leaving tons of grey area, and why hate speech codes should be opposed. As long as it doesn't violate the call-to-violence standard, highly controversial speech, including that motivated by hate, is exactly the sort of thing that students need to have the chance to confront and intellectually defeat in order to mature.
    – TheAtomicOption
    Oct 26, 2017 at 0:32

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