Safe Places, Millennials, and College Campuses

Graduation Day... so long ago.

I hate everything about "safe places." Let's start there. I hate the term, I hate what they stand for, I hate what what they are. The entire idea completely offends my senses, even though I'm a progressive person who generally abhors everything they are trying to keep out. My basic issue is that you can't protect people from scary ideas. You can't protect people in the real world from opposing views. You can't protect people from offensive ideas, words, and people. There will always be a number of people who hold hate in their hearts for entire groups of people. They will always vocalize why. This will never cease to be offensive. We have to live in the same world though. In a world where we increasingly have more opinion to vocalize our views (i'm writing on a blog right now for instance), we're going to have to accept that there will be competing views. Such is life. We can't hide our youth from troubling topics, views, and opinions.

With that said, i'm not going to cheer on Oklahoma Wesleyan President Everett Piper for slamming students for seeking a "safe place" from what they deemed an offensive religious sermon. Obviously a religious college like this is a special case, but setting that aside, the point of colleges should not be to offend at every turn either. A college should not seek to tell their students how awful they are, or how weak they are for disagreeing with those repudiations. This guy sought out national attention for grandstanding. He's getting it from the expected places.

Conservatives love this kind of grandstanding because it's against "the enemy" for them. They like to punch at millennials for not sharing their world view, particularly on cultural issues. It is true that millennials are more willing to accept censorship of offensive ideas than generations past, which to the American conservative mind is blasphemy (often times because they want to be offensive with their rhetoric). So of course, they are cheering him for "standing up to the P.C. police." The problem is they are defining "political correctness" with something wrong or evil- really it's just not being a jerk. It's not going out of your way to offend people on the basis of their race, religion, gender, sexuality, or any other demographic trait. Yes, Dr. Piper is railing against the idea of shielding oneself from ridicule or opposing views, which is admirable. The people responding to him though just want to be able to be as ignorant as they feel like.

The millennial generation is generally in a place on speech rights that i'm not comfortable with- the idea that shielding from offense is more important than freedom to speak as one sees fit. With that said, the answer isn't that they should just "take it" from racists, homophobes, and other bigot groups. The answer to hate speech is more speech- speech that defines the people spewing this vitriol as bigots and haters. We need less shielding and safe places, and more open speech and counter-speech.