If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man
(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)
The concept got flipped in the chain here -- what is actually happening on these campuses is the establishment of "free speech zones", where a person can say what they like, and the establishment of rules that, on the rest of the campus, punishment will occur for saying things that could trigger or make someone feel unsafe.
So, what's happening is that an entire campus is made to be this "safe" area.
Is the assertion that there are so many people on any given university campus who might have a breakdown that the entire campus must walk on egg shells? Because that is the side of the debate you're arguing from.
The idea of "well, in this one specific extraordinary case it's totally reasonable" is kinda played out among anyone with half a brain, because it's been used to justify so much bullshit.
Also, the entire dichotomy of warranted/unwarranted is suspect, but that's a different rabbit hole altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmkMndtH24
And check out this article for an ironic inversion of politics in the short span of 12 years:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/the_silencing_of_dissent...
So you have people on the right were shocked and triggered, screaming at the speaker and pulling the power on his microphone, and people on the left demanded that hard truths must be spoken so suck it up. But I wonder if today he could do this speech without giving trigger warnings for colonialism and war. I wonder if a university would even give him the freedom up front to do a speech without vetting the topic so it couldn't surprise anyone. Is this a price we're willing to pay?
Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught:
- First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escape; it would be preferrable to catch such things before then, which is what all that "Trigger Warning: pictures of torture" stuff is about;
- And second, things like grad speeches are usually put on loudspeakers and carried along across the internal campus PA and video-channel to PA speakers and TVs in various places, etc. It's hard to get away from such a thing, even when warned that it will contain something that might trigger your condition, especially if your life is effectively isolated to the campus (you live in the dorms, etc.)
It was under those two requirements that I saw the idea of a "safe space" as being possibly useful: it gives such people a place to go where they know the content won't follow them.
Under any other conditions, it's a horrible idea. :)