No Safe Spaces by Dennis Prager & Mark Joseph

Author:Dennis Prager & Mark Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

We’ve talked about some of the reasons professors have for letting academics—the reason for the academy, by the way—go off the rails. But why do administrators sit by and let the inmates run the asylum?

Politically speaking, the oppression typically goes one way. You don’t see Noam Chomsky getting chased out of a guest lecture by an angry mob. No college is going to let “scope and logistics” prevent Barack Obama from gracing their campus. When free speech gets clipped, it’s usually people from the center-right getting hushed.

The administrators don’t agree with that type of speech in the first place, so they are more likely to go along with their kindred spirits in shutting it down. They’re not usually really malicious, and it’s not some kind of conspiracy. It’s just that the administrators have the same blind spot as their students: when they hear something with which they disagree, they don’t feel the need to stick their necks out to make sure it is heard.

Parents who raise precious snowflakes and administrators who coddle them make the situation in higher education nearly impossible to fix. If just one side was the bad influence, you might hope the other side could balance the equation. But the combination of modern hyper-parenting and left-leaning professors and administrators has allowed students to remake universities into large-scale editions of the island in Lord of the Flies.

Solutions will not emerge on their own. They will require personal responsibility on the part of people raising kids and people teaching kids.

You get a lot of flak on campus nowadays if you say you want boys to man up and become men. Some people suggest it’s sexist. They never have a problem with girls becoming women, though. The phrase means to grow up. Whatever gender you are or identify as, at some point you have to become an adult.

All of us who are adults right now have to step up and act like adults. It is up to us to say, “This is nonsense.” It’s up to parents to raise tougher, more independent children who can go to college and choose not to be offended by every person who expresses an opinion with which they disagree. It’s up to faculty and administrators to have the resolve to say, “So what?” when students complain about being offended—and tell them to suck it up and deal with it.

It is up to all of us to realize that we know more about the world than an eighteen-year-old kid does (even if the eighteen-year-old kid doesn’t understand that), and it’s our job to help that kid learn more. It is our job to guide them and help them mold their brains into functioning adult minds that can think and reason and enjoy life.

Like Whitney Houston, we believe the children are the future. But adults are in charge in the present, and we should start acting like it.

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