As much as I disapprove of the caricatureizing of the concept of not being a rude person and the extreme positions that are being taken by the students, I feel it's still important to recognize they are young adults navigating these heavy concepts of balancing censorship and unacceptable behavior that deserves derision such as shouting slurs at people. Being condescending and dismissive of the entire concept just comes off as a rather extreme reaction to young people being what they've always been and exploring the society's boundaries that they live in and seeing what negatives they can change in their own circles. Once they actually get out of university I'm sure it'll be fine, as every generation has been one way or another.
Religious students don't get trigger warnings for courses that treat their views as anywhere between foolish and evil. Classical liberals don't get trigger warnings for their sociology, cultural anthropology or social psychology courses, despite the fact that all those disciplines have faculty that are overwhelmingly leftist. There's a great deal of diversity of opinion in those departments but it's diversity of leftist opinion.
People aren't stupid. Trigger warnings aren't used in a way that has any correspondence to PTSD triggers. They're used as a stick to beat political opinions of the losing faction with, currently the right.
Could you explain further some examples of trigger warnings IRL that you've dealt with, because I assume there aren't widespread studies about this sort of thing and you seem to have a vastly different experience than mine. I'd like to understand it.
The discussion is primarily about how people perceive the idea of a safe space over the actual experience of it. I don't think it's very useful, it just reinforces peoples' perceptions of others without actually engaging with those peoples and concepts/experiences directly.
As for safe spaces, this is fine if we're talking about a room at university, but if we're talking about making a university itself a "safe space" then forget about it. It's a public place where people have to live their lives.
Anyway I believe that it is already covered well. There is anti harassment law. And treating rape victim badly is fast way to loose friends.
We are not talking about tiny fraction of people, but majority of population has some skeleton in the closet. Stats says that up to 25% women are rape victims, should all of them get a safe space?
Also does this cover men? Prison rape jokes are quite popular on mainstream TV. And it is still socially acceptable to say that 12 year old boy "got lucky" with older lady.
And how about war veterans with PTSD?
I believe my response covers it. It is very expensive or impossible to provide safe space for everyone in its current form.
And if we provide safe spaces, we should probably start at prisons, which have much harsher conditions than universities.
I will ask, is there much wrong with a group of people organizing a safe space for themselves? It's impossible to make a public space "safe" but is it possible for individual groups to make spaces for themselves IRL? For example, my research university had an area in which LGBTQ people had meetups for bi people, LGBTQ of color, etc. I found that perfectly possible to exist.
I knew a girl in college who had been violently raped and it obviously had a profoundly traumatic impact on her. She needed help. However, the solution was not to avoid teaching about The Rape of Lucretia.
But this is the point -- how prevalent are actual psychological triggers and PTSD, compared to the price of "safe spaces" etc? The examples given are not all that contrived compared to the ones people successfully use to silence each other, regardless of how scientifically accurate they may not be. Do we rely on mental health professionals to give certificates of trigger, or do we err on the side of bowing to every claim of offense and trauma? The GP demonstrated the absurdity of the latter, and I think the former is untenable too. The middle ground is "Try to be nice and have a thick skin", I guess.
A few examples:
Many of my relatives died because of marxism. My grandfather was in jail, because he was capitalist and employed 5 people. I can not be around people who approve any form of class warfare or class privilege. And I find cultural marxism triggering!
My ancestors were slaves. In fact even word "slavery" is named after "slavic" people. By using that word, you are condoning slavic people to be slaves and that is TRIGGERING ME!