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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I admit I haven't tried to research the "safe spaces" issue very much, but my very, very general understanding is that there quite a few different understandings of what a safe space is. Some people want their classrooms to be safe spaces in the sense that they'll be warned in advance and possibly allowed to opt out if certain uncomfortable things are discussed. This can become very awkward for professors who are teaching topics (think civil rights history, civil rights law, topics related to abuse or sex crimes, etc) that may be uncomfortable to some students.

In some sense, it's a bit like "political correctness". I doubt that the people who rail against political correctness and the people who encourage political correctness are talking about exactly the same thing.

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Oh I see. I can understand that if a student is disrupting a class saying its too upsetting, there might be some issue with that. I've been to classes where a fundamentalist christian held up an entire lecture because he didn't agree with evolution (in a class called "evolutionary biology"). Is that a similar disruption happening in civil rights history/law classes?

I haven't specifically heard of that kind of overt disruption (which is not to say it doesn't exist). I do, however, know some professors who are currently nervous about teaching certain topics, even though those topics are fairly fundamental to their curricula.

Political correctness is correct as long as it is not directly related to the required class material. For instance, you can't teach history without talking about slavery. If that upsets a student, then that is definitely her problem, not anyone else's.

They often are, but talk past each other, in what's known as a Motte and Bailey[1][2]. A mens rights group doesn't want to ban all women from holding positions of power, just the incapable ones. Who's a capable woman? Well, they haven't found one, but if they did they'd surely let her into their club. Their core argument sounds like it might meet you halfway, but they never do.

Variants along this argument come up all the time. It's pretty much the entirety of political speechwriting; Even Trump's most outlandish statements are forms of it. He'll proclaim to ban all muslims, back up to 'well, just enhanced screening', but darned if it's not going to be racist anyway. But on the opposite side, nearly every gun control argument ends up this way, with someone asking that just 'assault weapons' with 'no sports shooting value' be banned, and then their list of assault weapons is based on whatever the most common rifle is at the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle [2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch#Motte_and_baile...

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