Professor: Faculty Now Fear Students Demanding ‘Safe Spaces’

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Northwestern University professor was accused of retaliation and investigated after students claimed an article she had written had a “chilling effect” on students’s ability to report sexual misconduct.

Writing on Friday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis describes an academic climate in which professors lay awake at night in fear of losing their careers over a single careless word or missed trigger warning. A new academic culture is rising in which hurt feelings are considered evidence of an attack. This hypersensitivity is being abetted by an expanding process of Title IX charges which allow anyone with an agenda or a grudge to go on the offensive against the faculty:

"As I understand it, any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.

And there are a lot of grudges these days. The reality is that the more colleges devote themselves to creating “safe spaces” — that new watchword — for students, the more dangerous those campuses become for professors. It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.

Most academics I know — this includes feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer — now live in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster. After the essay appeared, I was deluged with emails from professors applauding what I’d written because they were too frightened to say such things publicly themselves. My inbox became a clearinghouse for reports about student accusations and sensitivities, and the collective terror of sparking them, especially when it comes to the dreaded subject of trigger warnings, since pretty much anything might be a “trigger” to someone, given the new climate of emotional peril on campuses."'