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She was threatened with another for shaking her head.

A student at Edinburgh University in Scotland is claiming that she was hit with a “safe space complaint” because she raised her hand to disagree with something during a student-council meeting.

Imogen Wilson, vice president for academic affairs at the school’s student association, claims that she was also threatened with removal from the meeting over the hand gesture, but ultimately allowed to stay. (Phew!)


According to an article in the Washington Times, Wilson had risen her hand to express disagreement with another student’s resolution proposing a boycott of Israel — which was a problem because the school’s official “Safe Space Policy” forbids “hand gestures which denote disagreement or in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made.”

Yes, seriously. And it gets worse: The hand-raising was not the only thing that got Wilson in trouble during the meeting. Apparently, she also made the mistake of shaking her head disapprovingly — an offense so serious that she was threatened with yet another violation because of it.

#share#Seeing as we are talking about adults here, all of this is obviously insane. Fortunately, however, it turns out that not all of these students are so completely cuckoo. In fact, the incident prompted one of Wilson’s classmates, Charlie Peters, to launch a petition against the policy:


“I believe an institution which upholds the principles of free speech and diversity is superior to a Students’ Association that patronises its own students by insinuating that they cannot handle opinions that differ from their own,” the petition states. “We are adults, we do not need condescension or safeguarding.”


At the time of publication, Peters’s petition had nearly 1,200 signatures.