@marlowe1 In practice, “safe spaces” are nothing more than places where people do not have to fear judgement, abuse, or harassment. For example: if you draw a swastika on the door of a Jewish student, you will be removed from your house and likely banned from that dorm. If you walk into the Center for Identity and Inclusion and start handing out pamphlets you found on the Westboro Baptist Church’s webpage explaining the infernal future of anyone who isn’t straight, you are going to be asked to leave. It really isn’t such a terrifying boogieman: it’s a matter of basic human decency.
Similarly, “trigger warnings” aren’t, as much as the right loves to pontificate on, warnings that you’re about to encounter an idea you may not like. They are warnings that you’re about to encounter something traumatic. Obvious example: no professor is going to tell the class to read Lolita without giving a heads up on the main subject it deals with. I don’t think anyone reads Lolita without feeling disturbed, but if you’ve been through similar experiences you may not even be able to read it without painful memories and associations coming back. Nobody seems to have a problem with a natural morphism: it’s generally not considered okay to shove a 6 inch long hairy tarantula into people’s faces with no warning, so I don’t see why people make such a big deal about this.
The university’s hypocrisy on the subject is particularly annoying because by recognizing the hysteria-filled anti-definitions of these topics they grant them legitimacy while the university knows perfectly well that these aren’t actually unreasonable things for students to ask for and is willing to actually do them in practice.