Conrad: "Safe Spaces" Are Unsafe for Free Exchange of Ideas

"'Trigger Warnings' are just another way of saying 'Shut Up', argues Laurel Conrad, the Institute's Lecture Director in a Legal Insurrection post. "Why should the leftist students control the conversation and keep out other perspectives?"

College campuses are meant to be a place where students engage in new perspectives and critical reasoning. Or so they say.

But by labeling conservative points of view as “extremist,” “anti-feminist,” and “racist,” feminists are shutting down the dialogue on their college campuses before it even begins.

To the leftist student activists, it seemingly doesn’t matter whether or not these labels are deserved. They’ve realized that all they need to do is to stigmatize a talk by a conservative speaker is to condemn the speaker as an oppressing force.

For instance, last Thursday, I facilitated a lecture at the Georgetown University on behalf of the conservative organization I work for, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, and the Georgetown CRs.

As soon as the campus feminists caught wind of the event, they immediately began protesting and demanding trigger warnings in order to silence the talk.

The lecture, given by author and Luce Institute speaker Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, was entitled ‘What’s Right (and Badly Wrong) with Feminism?’ It was set to take a critical look at the failures and good points of feminism.

But from listening to the campus feminists, you would inaccurately think Dr. Sommers was gearing up to give a lecture on ‘Rape Apology.’

Read the rest.