Dear fragile millennials,

I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. Consider this a trigger warning.

The real world isn’t the adult kindergarten you are experiencing at your university.

There are no quiet rooms with milk and cookies, colouring books or puppies to help you cope with things you don’t agree with.

“Trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” and denying invitations to those whose views are different is undeniably ridiculous.

And it simply doesn’t exist outside the walls of any university.

For everyone else: I’m talking about the utter disregard for free speech and the comfortable rise in censorship on our university campuses.

This isn’t new.

Safe spaces or trigger warnings are attempts to make everything on university campuses inclusive.

But unfortunately they do that by excluding unwanted people, real facts, or challenging ideas.

This is turning learning institutions intended at preparing young adults for the real world into very expensive private kindergartens.

Take for example the headlines after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory at campuses across the United States.

Cancelled classes, postponed exams and grieving circles — all because students absolutely could not go on knowing they will have to live in a world where the president was not the president they wanted.

I wouldn’t vote for him if I could, but I still went to work the next day.

What was once a place for intellectual debate and vigorous conversation is no more.

If you don’t fit the desired narrative of progressive social justice directed by student unions with excessive power and no mandate you don’t get to speak.

But if you do and people don’t like it, well then... Activities desired by most three-and-half year olds begin promptly at 2 p.m. in the room down the hall to cope with the disagreement.

This new found university censorship disguised as safe spaces is a threat to the principles of academia and by extension our own democracy. It stifles debate, coddles and overprotects students from understanding the issues they may one day face when they graduate.

The infantilization and absurd demands for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” on our university campuses will damage the credibly of those very institutions.

They pervert the true value of inclusiveness and diversity, and frankly they don’t serve those who may actually need such accommodations for trauma they may have faced.

It doesn’t even stop at academic debate, earlier this year a yoga class taught at a Canadian university for the last seven years was cancelled because students and volunteers were uncomfortable with “cultural issues” involved.

The very idea that students should be safe from uncomfortable ideas — or worse free Yoga classes — suggests that they are too vulnerable to participate in, well, life.

And that’s going to be tough.

So fragile millennials, have a cup of coffee, put on some rap music and fight for the things you believe in.

Don’t hide from scary ideas you don’t agree with.

-- Melissa Lantsman was a senior political advisor to the previous Conservative government. She currently lives, works and casually observes politics in Toronto