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Comment by samsolomon | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space.

College should be a place where your beliefs should be challenged. If we've learned anything, echo chambers are strong and becoming stronger. The only way to combat that is with adversity.

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The University of Up is Down?

What if that belief is that you're fine being an LGBTQ person, and the "challenge" is from people who believe that you shouldn't exist or have the same rights as others?

If you believe you are right then why can't you simply disagree with it, rather than hide from anything that _might_ be a "challenge"?

Because if you disagree with it you get your face bashed in?

Do you really? Then you call the police. The fact that these topics can't be discussed without escalation to violence (or people assuming it will lead to violence) should be troubling to everyone. In the free market of ideas, you win or lose by the merits of your ideas. If you're just spouting racism and bigotry then you will lose, and everyone will ignore you. But even then, there's no need for violence.

That's just plain violence and already illegal. You also have the right to defend yourself in those circumstances, and you don't need to have that kind of discussion all by yourself. I think some states go as far as letting you shoot your attacker, stand your ground laws and all.

Cutting off communication between groups doesn't prevent violence. It creates echo chambers that allow them to drift further and further apart. At some point, the only way they can communicate is violence.

Then oddly enough, it becomes less about you being challenged and more about those who believe you shouldn't exist being challenged. Colleges are great for exposure to peers with varying backgrounds and beliefs and are great for fostering understanding of each other's viewpoints. Isolating your group to spaces of the same people will probably strengthen that demarcation and lessen the incentive (and the ability) for those with hardened beliefs to understand the other side's viewpoints. Sometimes all it takes is befriending one LGBTQ to melt that belief.

What if, sometimes, LGBTQ people want to achieve things other than challenging people who believe they don't exist - things like, say, arranging financial support for people who've been disowned by their family for being gay and are in danger of becoming homeless, or even just having a friendly chat with other LGBTQ people about their experiences? That's what the LGBT space at university was used for when I was there.

Feel free to do so on their private property as has always been their right.

Many universities are private property, and students have a say in how they are used, hence school-sanction safe spaces existing in the first place.

As long as they receive no public funding I don't see a problem with it, but you don't get to take federal dollars and put up a no whites allowed sign on the door.

There's nothing wrong with talking to or gathering with other people like you or other people who think like you. The problem is when that's the only thing you do.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

If that's your belief, you can talk to that person or dismiss them.

Talking to them opens an opportunity for mutual understanding, while dismissing them changes nothing.

EDIT: I don't know why you're being downvoted. You've proposed a great example.

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