The American college campus has become one of the least open, least free places in the nation—and with respect to many subjects, not just a few. Genuine debate about abortion, affirmative action, feminism, gay marriage, global warming, gun rights, hate crimes, illegal immigration, Islam, Israel, racism, sexual assault, and transgender identity has been rendered difficult, if not impossible. And we are awash in new euphemisms for censorship: trigger warnings, safe spaces, free speech zones, fill-in-the-blank-phobic slurs, micro-aggressions, and verbal “violence.”
A substantial portion of this vocabulary derives from feminism, which has succeeded in making its anti-intellectual agenda academic dogma. Criticism of feminist concepts is recast as patriarchal, hurtful, or “violent,” obliterating the distinction between psychological discomfort and physical injury. And that erasure has inspired a thousand other complaints, delivering us to this new land where any speech that offends someone’s progressive sensibility is now deemed too “hurtful” to be uttered. Those who cross this line, deliberately or even accidentally, face vitriol, emotional bullying, and sometimes physical attack.
(Peter W. Wood, "Forgetting Freedom," Claremont Review of Books 15 [summer 2015]: 73-6, at 75)
