Among other collegiate eccentricities, Shulevitz details the somewhat infantile soothing materials set aside in a private room for Brown University students who felt upset by discussions of sexual assault. The walls of this room took on a near apocalyptic metaphorical significance for the chattering class, with the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education worrying that “universities cannot fulfill their vital function as places where students learn how to think, research, and debate if community members strive to avoid speech that makes them uncomfortable.” At the National Review Online, Charles C. W. Cooke adduced the Brown safe space as an apparatus of a new McCarthyism, while Reason’s Robby Soave declared that such accommodation “emboldens [undergraduates] to seek increasingly absurd and infantilizing restrictions on themselves and each other.”
All this coincided with an incident at Reed College in which an undergraduate was asked not to attend discussion sections of a required humanities course after he repeatedly made remarks about rape and feminism that the course instructor deemed disruptive. Conservative outlets took up the cause, convinced that the student’s non-PC perspective was responsible for his censure. As Mary Emily O’Hara pointed out at The Daily Beast, the misguided undergraduate swiftly became a stand-in for all of the conservative angst about political correctness and constitutional issues that would normally fester.