Will Curation and Safe Spaces at College Lead to a Fear of Living?
by Miki Saxon
Earlier this month I shared a conversation with a founder who believes he can lead only one type of person.
It wasn’t that surprising, because the more things are curated the more we hear from and cleave to people like ourselves.
There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.
But isn’t college supposed to help change that by exposing students to people with different beliefs, experiences, attitudes, etc.?
Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.
Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.
Now college students are taking the concept much further with the demand for “safe spaces.”
Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. (…)
Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School commented, “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”
This need for safety and zero-level tolerance for discord makes me wonder what will happen to the current college generations when they venture into the workplace, let alone the rest of the real world.
Image credit: Deb Nystrom
