I ‘ve been reading an awful lot lately about efforts to keep students safe on college campuses. Safe not just from physical harm but from ideas, speech, and idea-speaking people that may upset them. Examples are as ubiquitous and darkly fascinating as that YouTube video of a python eating an alligator. In one recent spasm, at Northwestern University, professor Laura Kipnis found herself charged under the Title IX antidiscrimination act for publishing an essay arguing that, far from empowering the students, prohibitions against student-professor dating encourage them to “regard themselves as exquisitely sensitive creatures.” (As of June 1, Kipnis had been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing.”) New York Times pundit Judith Shulevitz wrote in March about Brown University students so alarmed by the possible psychic repercussions of a debate on rape that they designated a safe room “equipped 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.”
Soldiers discover Mary in her nursery and pack her off to a gloomy Yorkshire estate haunted by her Uncle Archibald, who’s entered a kind of emotional safe room of his own since his wife, Lily, died. Wan, purse-lipped, and imperious, Mary has no idea that she can’t treat English domestic workers the way she treated her Indian ayah, so she’s mightily taken aback when chambermaid Martha refuses to dress her. “It’ll do thee good to wait on thysen a bit,’” Martha tells Mary in her Yorkshire brogue. “My mother always said she couldn’t see why grand people’s children didn’t turn out fair fools—what with nurses an’ bein’ washed an’ dressed an’ took out to walk as if they was puppies!’” And so begins Mary’s education in life.
Correction: This text has amended to correctly reflect the name of New York Times op-ed contributor Judith Shulevitz.
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