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How the freedom to voice unpopular views could represent an affront to democracy is unclear. Presumably it offends the right to live in a protective bubble, secure against any views but one’s own. The fact that faculty members — whose job presumably involves exposing students to unfamiliar thoughts, views and realities for the sake of learning — would promote a wilful retreat into nescience suggests this blight on academia still has a way to run before it wears itself out.

It makes one wonder what academics view as the reason for education. How does a person develop a rounded understanding of the world as it exists if he or she is to be sheltered from awareness of any views that person doesn’t already hold? How do you learn the world’s 7.4 billion people embody many differences if you’re too afraid to confront anything different?

It is the educational equivalent of parents who so obsessively shield their children from germs that they fail to develop the ability to resist disease. Academics who isolate students from learning are the equal of anti-vaxxers who refuse to inoculate a child against measles, leaving the child more vulnerable to the actual disease.

While much of academia appears oblivious to its own foolishness, at least one government has shown the nerve to point it out for them. British Prime Minister Theresa May denounced the notion of “safe spaces” as “quite extraordinary.”

“We want our universities not just to be places of learning but places where there is open debate,” she told Parliament on Thursday, agreeing with a fellow MP who argued that “a sense of ridiculous entitlement by a minority of students means that their wish not to be offended shuts down debate.”

University is, by definition, a place where different, and sometimes obnoxious, opinions can be aired. It is the very basis of democratic freedom, the clash of ideas that leads to understanding, awareness and — with any luck — to human progress. It is unfortunate that so many campuses continue to embrace a preference for deliberate ignorance. Students need exposure to ideas if they are going to develop the ability to think critically for themselves. Perhaps it’s the professors they need protection from.

National Post