I've actually been to a few to see what exactly is going on and what I found was that those meetings tended to talk about issues that are very specific to those groups and therefore there couldn't be much in the way of discussion for people not in those groups. It's not too dissimilar from a meetup of people who want to discuss specific algorithmic proofs in that it's a "safe space" for people in that field and in that education and the quality of conversation would be less productive for the people there if someone not in that field or education arrived and joined in with a bunch of confusion or lack of education about what algorithms are.

I really am confused because I've yet to encounter a "safe space" in which I felt that there was a plan to censor people or order people that they can't say certain things. Meetings hosted by the "safe space" at my university have come off to me as a space to intellectually discuss topics more or less pertaining to a demographic who would otherwise not have as productive a conversation if they had to explain what sexuality is. I've also experienced similar environments in editor's meetups in literature and research groups in STEM.

Could you provide me with a study or article regarding how the existence of an isolated space for the discussion of topics is wrong or bad? I don't mean to attack you or say that "safe spaces" are a good thing. I just don't see the difference between "safe spaces" for minorities differs from spaces of intellectual discussion in STEM.

edit: also safe spaces promote acceptance of dogma over free thinking, which Universities claim to be centers of.

I don't understand how there was dogma over free thinking in this context. I keep trying to understand where my experiences with things labeled "safe space" align with a rather big voice on the internet and within my peers that "safe space" meetups are somehow oppressive or regressive to ideals and communication. I wouldn't be offended that there exists literary workshops that I cannot attend or that there are physics conferences I wouldn't be welcome in because I know nothing of physics.

Could you suggest a "safe space" for me to enter and observe for myself that would better align with this issue? I understand there aren't any serious surveys or academic study listing experiences of "safe space" and their repercussions so I've been trying to seek out and gather my own data.

Also, as a straight, white person myself, I understand that there are some discussions where my opinions are irrelevant and unwanted because I simply haven't experienced what others have and am unable to understand and empathize as intimately. Excluding my opinion isn't a slight against free thinking, it's a shortcut because I have nothing to contribute.

Or in other words, outside perspectives are never useful? All the advice about having papers / presentations proofread by people not involved, about looking to outside sources to check if you're stuck in a rut, about the value of diversity of backgrounds and opinions, is all bullshit and worse than useless?

That's pretty much it. Also to actualize through the echo chamber.

I was going to jump in and say this. Basically everyone has a "safe space" that they go to every day, but students often don't, especially the freshmen in residence randomly assigned roommates.

To designate a space on campus where students can go where their ideology will be respected no matter what just compensates for the fact they don't have a home that they can kick people out of.

The problem is that the safe space attitude spreads to the rest of the campus, which isn't OK, but it happens because of faculty attitudes and risk of litigation, and it would happen even if no designated safe spaces existed.

The way I see it, designating a safe space is a good way for universities to keep dogma out of classrooms.

In some sense, it's a bit like "political correctness". I doubt that the people who rail against political correctness and the people who encourage political correctness are talking about exactly the same thing.

Variants along this argument come up all the time. It's pretty much the entirety of political speechwriting; Even Trump's most outlandish statements are forms of it. He'll proclaim to ban all muslims, back up to 'well, just enhanced screening', but darned if it's not going to be racist anyway. But on the opposite side, nearly every gun control argument ends up this way, with someone asking that just 'assault weapons' with 'no sports shooting value' be banned, and then their list of assault weapons is based on whatever the most common rifle is at the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle [2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch#Motte_and_baile...

There's a difference between having a meet-up or speech on campus on specialized topics and blocking all dissenting opinions because of feelings (not logic mind you.) Well before "safe spaces" were a thing, when I was in school, I could go to speeches that had minority opinions...no one ever disrespected the speakers; even if we had topic of disagreeing. I went to a viewing of a trans documentary, there was no "safe space," there was a good discussion afterwards. There was no need for a "safe space," because we were all adults, we aren't children.

What you are essentially describing is a forum about specific topics. That's not a "safe space," it may have been one but that's not quite an accurate representation.

One example of a "safe space" gone wrong has been the banning of certain speakers (that were already booked) from speaking on campus, because it violated student's "safe space." This has happened to a number of people, including Bill Maher and Condoleezza Rice. If you can't listen to the views of those you disagree with, you are not going to be a tolerant person. It encourages uniformity of ideas, the opposite of what academic inquiry should be about.

Then, we have things like "free speech zones" on campus, designated areas on campus where you are allowed to speak freely, displaying free speech on other part of campus can get you expelled. (read more about these on thefire.org.)

Anyhow, here's an op-ed from Michael Bloomberg and Charles Koch (not example bed fellows) http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-speech-matters-on-campu...

I do really encourage you to read the thefire.org, campus practices on free speech are often awful. You can look up your own school on their site and view their score on free speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcp36n2cDg

There is also the not new issue of students protesting speakers they think have objectionable views worth protesting on campus. This bothers some free speech advocates even though it is an expression of free speech. Something something totalitarianism, slippery slope, etc. I find it an overreaction from the right. In my personal opinion, speech is free when it is free to be in conflict.

So really there are very many issues developing right now on college campuses and they are all conflated together because the point is to have an enemy to hate ("SJW's" or "the regressive left"). So diverse issues and points of views are agglomerated into one ball of evil to hate. Some people refuse to allow college students, barely adults, to be wrong or misguided and learn from their mistakes. Also those same people like to pretend college students have immense power to censor speech at a scale that threatens what they find good in society.

There's also a certain zealotry in defense of the status quo which is probably older than history itself.

Citing free speech, to protest someone exercising their free speech, is... I dunno, there seems something backwards there. Someone is missing the point, at any rate.

At a general level is that not the point of education? If people who have studied economics dont understand economics, the benefits and perils of different economic policies and activities, better then those who have never thought about it, then surely there's something seriously wrong?

> In terms of acceptance of minorities, especially (gay, trans or just ethnic) I think that liberal mindset comes from an academic need to include minority opinions into discussion.

This is actually testable, physics, maths and other "hard" sciences gain nothing from including minority opinions (or any opinions) so by your logic science academics should be less liberal then social scientists or liberal arts professors. I doubt that's true though.

I suspect that the better educated a person is the wider their experience or people from other backgrounds and the wider the experience the more the acceptance. But that's just an educated guess ;-)

Yes, but the people who are are often for "progressive/liberal" economic policies (not to be confused with neoliberal economic policies) are often not in the field of economics.

Krugman and most in the Keynesian school, a "left leaning" school, knows the value of free trade. Yet if you go to other intellectuals in other subjects, such as Philosophy, etc, you will find little tolerance for the ideas of free trade. Honestly, I don't know if Krugman or even Galbraith fit under the "liberal" spectrum anymore, economically speaking, because the rise of Warren and Bernie are not inline the universally accepted ideas of 99% of economists.

Really outside of the school of business on campuses, you will find that everyone completely disagrees with everyone in the school of business about economics.

So no, it isn't because people are "specialized" in a subject and believe they can leverage that on other people's lives or policies. I'm pretty sure that's not quite what Smith had in mind when he spoke of specialization. I believe it is an elitist mindset they the educated are -better- people and -should- run the lives of others, etc through "progressive" policies. That doesn't mean they know anything about the subject of economics or know anything about other people's lives.

Do I agree with some of those policies? Sure, but if you talk to some people on campus their world view is completely paternalistic and illogical.

I'd say it's more that they think they know better than tradition. They have the best reasoning skills and the most formalized evidence, which are of course better than generations of trial-and-error and heuristics and stacked biases.

In terms of acceptance of minorities, especially (gay, trans or just ethnic) I think that liberal mindset comes from an academic need to include minority opinions into discussion.

With the history of things like women having to write under male pseudonyms and people with the wrong opinions getting shut out ("scientific progress happens one funeral at a time"), this probably comes from somewhere else. I'd say it got fashionable somehow and then got stuck in a positive feedback loop.

or it comes from being smart enough to see the illogic of religious belief and to hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices.

A lot of religious people don't take their beliefs literally. It's more stories that they know are just stories (or just don't care if they're literally true or not), but that illustrate some important point and provide a shared context for talking about it.

Like how it doesn't matter if the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote is actually true or not, or Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the rest of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion , or the Story of Mel the Real Programmer, or the 500 mile email, etc. They illustrate important principles and shared cultural values, and strict historical accuracy isn't actually that important to their usefulness.

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hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices.

The annoying thing about prejudices, is they're often not so much flat wrong as deliberately under-fitting the data for performance reasons or bootstrapping a model for a new environment with data from an old environment. For example, there's a lovely article about how affirmative action quotas encourage racism here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prop... .