Judith Shulevitz contributes regular op-eds to the New York Times on “feminism, culture, and science.” On Sunday she wrote incisively about a now trending concept on university campuses: the notion of creating “safe spaces,” where students are protected from having to hear potentially offensive or distressing intellectual discussions (“In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas“).

She’s not openly mocking, but you can’t mistake her attitude either.

Shulevitz gives as an illustration my own college, Brown, where students responded to a public debate between two speakers on “rape culture” by setting up an alternative “safe space” furnished with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” The trauma, that is, of hearing a discussion featuring ideas you don’t like.

Well, that is just pathetic. The dual notion that women students would not find such infantilization offensive, while at the same time they would be unable to handle hearing an open discussion featuring the potentially troubling ideas of libertarian Wendy McElroy — that I find offensive on behalf of serious, thoughtful, and mature women everywhere.

Why do I bring it up here? Only because most mainstream media already create a “safe space” for readers troubled by potentially unsettling scientific debates. The same day that Judith Shulevitz published her article, the New York Times Magazine noted the online discussion of “junk DNA” sparked by Carl Zimmer’s recent essay in the same newspaper (“Re: Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?“).

Is there garbage in our genome? Carl Zimmer’s March 8 article about the debate in the scientific community over junk DNA sparked a conversation that spread to the blogs of half a dozen scientists.

At Evolution News & Views, we covered that at some length. The NYT article refers to a bunch of Junk DNA partisans, including PZ Myers and Larry Moran, quoting them and linking to their posts. It also refers to unnamed “supporters of intelligent design, [who] cited the Encode Project, an N.I.H.-sponsored attempt to catalog the functional elements of the genome.” ID advocates are not quoted, so the reader has no way of knowing who we are or what we actually say.

Yet in the days following the publication of Carl Zimmer’s article, which promoted the old Onion Test as a proof that our genome is junky, we had a lot more to say than simply to point to ENCODE. See our coverage here:

• “Onion Exposé: Carl Zimmer on Why “Junk DNA” Had Better Be Real“
• “More on Junk DNA and the ‘Onion Test’“
• “The Onion Test Is a Red Herring“

Nothing a “supporter of intelligent design” actually wrote on the subject is reproduced lest, presumably, the reader of the New York Times be discomfited and dislodged from his safe space.

The article by Judith Shulevitz, incidentally, introduces a young man, Adam Shapiro, who’s a student at Columbia. He

decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

That is great. His room is a “dangerous space,” which is to say an “intellectual space” where it’s possible to “gain more insight into truth.” Good for him. Hiding from scary ideas is, needless to say — so you would think! — exactly the opposite of what you ought to be doing in college, or in adult life.

Image by BKP (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.