How quickly our major universities have caved in when hyper-sensitive and intolerant leftist students whine that hearing things they don’t want to hear makes them feel “unsafe.” Since “safety” perceptions now trump open discussion on many campuses, such students know they have a weapon to attack anyone who dares to disagree with them. An illuminating case occurred recently at UC Berkeley. As we read in The Daily Californian, “Students [in the School of Social Welfare] expressed concern over comments they said Professor Steven Segal made during a Feb. 9 Black Lives Matter event, introducing the topic of black-on-black crime into a small group discussion.”

The Black Lives Matter movement is all about attacking the police, so when Segal brought up black-on-black crime, he had walked into a minefield. A white grad student, Emily Myer is quoted as saying, “My first reaction was straight-up shock. That was followed by an acute awareness of rising anxiety and and a desperate need for him to stop.”

Naturally, once the students complained about him, Segal apologized, but as with Larry Summers, it was too late. The school’s dean, Jeffrey Edelson, declared, “We understand that a faculty-student exchange in our of our classrooms today caused offense and great distress to some of our students and made the classroom environment feel unsafe.” Moreover, the students were offered the opportunity of switching to a different professor. Of course — we can’t have grad students taking a course from a prof who makes them feel unsafe! Conflicting ideas are so, so threatening.

Dean Edelson met with the students, telling them, “I hope that you don’t see all faculty as adversaries, but that you see us as potential partners and champions of change.” So we’ve come to the point where angry grad students can make a dean grovel before them and say that the faculty isn’t there to teach them, but rather to act as their “partners and champions of change.”

How far will this go? I have a hunch that we will see this tactic played out again and again, in a wide array of disciplines. Profs had better go through their lectures carefully to excise any ideas that could make some students feel “unsafe.”

Hat tip: Hans Bader