This is part of the problem we face in higher education now. Too much emphasis is placed on the danger of hurting anyone’s feelings.
The Washington Examiner reports:
University of Florida asks students to evaluate ’emotional risk’ of campus eventsBefore approving student events, the University of Florida asks campus organizations to evaluate the “emotional risk” a potential event could pose.According to Young America’s Foundation (my previous employer), the event permit application student organizations are required to complete, hosted on the university’s online portal GatorConnect, includes a subsection titled “Emotional Risk” that asks students to “select all possibilities of Emotional Risk that may apply to your event.” The options include “Sensitive Subject Matter,” “Reaction of Participants,” and “Potential Controversy.”The university’s office of Student Activities and Involvement assigns each risk factor “a point value” which are “tallied to identify if the event will need an SAI staff presence.”Controversy over campus events featuring conservative speakers rocked higher education last year and it’s easy to imagine this process is designed to justify greater university control over lectures and events with the potential to irritate progressive campus activists. It’s also easy to imagine the requested assessment of “emotional risk” comes in response to the concerns of a generation of college students who claim to be impacted psychologically by ideas with which they disagree and believe they should be sheltered from them.
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