I don’t understand this at all.
For the second time today, I nearly duplicated a post I had already written. Princeton hasn’t been in the “Great Stupid” news lately as much as its Ivy League competitors, so my first headline was almost identical to this one from three years ago. Cornell, as we now know, has lost its collective mind. Columbia has been beyond redemption for a while now. The University of Pennsylvania’s president said essentially the same stuff before the Senate about whether anti-Semitsim on campus was acceptable depending on “context” as Harvard’s president, and was fired before Claudine Gay was. Yale, you will recall, has so disgraced itself that some judges announced last year that they will no longer accept clerks from Yale’s law school. (I don’t know what’s wrong with Dartmouth: apparently they just study and drink up there in the New Hampshire boondocks.)
Princeton, however, is apparently graduating complete weenies, a true embarrassment for a school whose mascot is a tiger. Princeton student Matthew Wilson revealed in an op-ed published in The Daily Princetonian, that after he brought a professor as a guest to lunch at one of Princeton’s social clubs, the club changed its visitors rule. Now, any student guests who aren’t relatives or friends will “henceforth not be permitted to enter the club during its ‘hours of food service operations’ without prior approval from undergraduate officers, club staff, and the alumni Board of Governors.”
Why the change, you may ask, as Wilson did. The policy was changed because the presence of the prof, who is one of Princeton’s lone conservatives, “made members feel unsafe.” Wait, is the professor rabid, a known serial killer, infected with ebola or prone to attack strangers? No, it’s just that his beliefs make the students feel unsafe. At an institution that once was dediacted to exposing young minds to a whole range of ideas and theories.
I confess, though this is not the first time I have encountered the fatuous “safe spaces” argument, I don’t understand it at all. This is not what “safe” means. Nobody is harmed or endangered by hearing opinions one disagrees with, so one can’t possibly be threatened by someone who is merely in the same room who isn’t saying anything directed you at all.
“The simple fact that they had to eat lunch in the same building as him — a respected professor at this university who many Charter students have taken classes with and even praised — was too much to handle,” Wilson wrote. “It was a grave error for [the club’s] leadership to bend to the demands of a few students who couldn’t stomach the possibility of being within shouting distance of someone whose views challenge their own,” Wilson continued.
Why should he, or anyone, even have to write this?
Ethics Alarms 
The alumus and employer of one of the first progressives, Woodrow Wilson, I recall. Im surprised it took over a century to reach this nadir.
I really don’t see how this is different from the traditional students at the Ivy Leagues. They used to complain that they felt unsafe in the presence of blacks, hispanics, Italians, Irish, Jews, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Where have you been? Conservative Thought=Hate Speech=Murder. Get with the program!
To think that their great-grandfathers scaled Pointe-Du-Hoc with grappling hooks. I’ve often thrown out the idea, only half-joking, that every university education should include a required course on the nature of violence – and it would involve helmets and pugil sticks.
While I appreciate Mr. Wilson’s thoughts, he is obviously not receiving the education he should expect for the tuition he is paying. Grammar and syntax leave a lot to be desired.
Abandonment of standards, destruction of language, culture, traditions, religion, family, education, patriotism …. the country is going to hell in a hand basket.
I feel really old.
“(I don’t know what’s wrong with Dartmouth: apparently they just study and drink up there in the New Hampshire boondocks.)”
I am reminded of an incident there in the NH boondocks when I was a student there back in the Dark Ages. A Government professor had written (or been quoted somehow) that Dartmouth students only wanted “to get drunk, get laid, and play softball on the Green.” The next day, a letter to the editor appeared in the college newspaper, signed by 50 or so students. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was something like “We the undersigned take offense at Professor M’s comments. We have no desire whatsoever to play softball on the Green.”
“In order to maintain an “inclusive environment” and communicate that Charter is a “sanctuary” for its members,..”
How does one maintain an inclusive environment if it is a sanctuary for its members?
sanctuary noun
sanc·tu·ary ˈsaŋ(k)-chə-ˌwer-ē
plural sanctuaries
1: a holy or sacred place
2: the most sacred part of a place of worship
3: a building or room for religious worship
4: a place that provides shelter or protection
a wildlife sanctuary
5: protection provided by a sanctuary
So the Charter is either a religious or sacred place where blasphemy is a violation or a place that provides safe harbor. In either case, by definition, it must exclude something or someone. Therefore, the Charter one or the other but it cannot be both.
More to the point, how can an inclusive environment require membership?
Why is treatment that claims a person is defective and needs to change from one thing to another is ‘affirming’, but stating that there is nothing wrong with the person is ‘conversion’? How can a single person be diverse? Why is cosmology defined as the study of an ETERNAL universe? Communists have always changed definitions to exclude or defame their opponents.
Well, well, well. Hot off the press:
Charter Club changed guest policy after conservative professor’s lunch. After headlines, the policy was reversed.
“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/04/princeton-news-stlife-robert-george-charter-club-meal-policy-national-headlines-eating
“Headlines in right wing publications.” 1. So non-right wing publications don’t care about this insanity? 2. Republicans pounce!
Without objecting to anything written to date, because I agree and don’t want to belabor the obvious, I didn’t understand this:
“Now, any student guests who aren’t relatives or friends will “henceforth not be permitted to enter the club during its ‘hours of food service operations’ without prior approval from undergraduate officers, club staff, and the alumni Board of Governors.””
When I first read this, I assumed that there was a mistake made describing it, so I read the article, and no… That was reinforced. “Family” seems relatively straightforward and self explanatory, although there could be some blurriness at the edges, but “Friend” seems like a very arbitrary and subjective term. Why not just say the professor is a friend?
I’m glad you mentioned that. It puzzled me too. I’d call anyone I brought as a lunch guest a “friend.” Was this just a coded rule targeting professors?
I’d call anyone I brought as a lunch guest a “friend.”
Exactly my take. I’m not an expert in academic standards, although that seems like an oxymoron as I type it, but I wonder if it might rely on some kind of rule against professors having “friendly” relations with students, as opposed to “professional” ones, perhaps as an overbroad protection against “friendly” being used as a euphemism for “romantic”?
Because unless something like that was true, I’m not sure how it could possibly be effective as intended.
I think the policy was understood to be ineffective except as a warning and a disincentive to bring hated conservatives to the club. Unless Princeton really has hit the skids, they had to know the thing was unenforceable. Which, come to think of it, can also be said of the Scotland law.
And even if the conservative professor jumped on the lunch counter, donned sunglasses, and started dancing like Psy while singing “MAGA Style” at the top of his lungs…what of it?
Sure, shoes on the lunch counter is unsanitary, but the rest of it is just bad-rap 1st Amendment free speech. This is another of those “speech-is-violence” examples…actually it’s worse because it’s “just-being-in-my-presence-is-violence”. Now hive-minded Lefties whose brains are too tender and whose skin is too whisper-thin just cry on their plate of “shrimp shapes” at the thought of being in the vicinity of someone that maybe, possibly, theoretically could ask them to consider a countering viewpoint.
How pathetic. We’re losing to THAT?!?
I’m not sure of the ethical question. I would disregard the term “safe space” as an argument altogether. It’s probably a ruse, a pretense that there is some danger. Danger normally connotes a physical danger, of violence or some other danger. I’m sure you realize this.
Obviously, there’s some ethical obligation to try to change an environment that allows or even encourages the ruse. When things have gone as far as they have, however, it appears that there is little to be done, without hurting one’s own future. Each person has to make an assessment of what’s at stake for them.
The future is the question, and how to survive and thrive, and how to do whatever can be done to return the intellectual environment to one in which reasonable people can once again prevail.
These days I’m often reminded of the line from Apocalypse Now, “Hell is the impossibility of reason.”
Honestly, I don’t think I could survive in the east, or the west coast. It would drive me crazy. The real threat to safety is someone who pronounces you, or me, as unsafe. What might someone as disconnected from reality do? Psychotic people can be dangerous, not because you or your ideas actually threaten them, of course, but because they mistakenly assume so. The one who uses the issue of safety as a ruse, might persuade a less stable person that we really are unsafe. That’s when our safety is at stake.