Judith Shulevitz’s New York Times op-ed on Sunday about colleges and “safe spaces” paints a bleak picture of campus life in America today. Titled “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas,” her piece contains example upon example of students aghast at the possibility that their schools would force or even allow them to confront controversial ideas—and describes a safe space at Brown as a “room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.”

“Safe spaces,” writes Shulevitz, “are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning.”

Certain things happening at colleges today are indeed silly, if not downright destructive. But before joining the chorus of those tsk-tsking today’s privileged youth for their hypersensitivity, we should ask whether such extreme cases are the norm or the exception. Conservative critics of academia have long pointed to the most scandalous-sounding or jargon-filled workshop titles as evidence that higher ed is in shambles, ignoring the Shakespeare courses and other signs that students are learning more or less what they always had been. While Shulevitz deserves credit for pointing to several specific examples of campus absurdities, we don’t really get a sense of the scope. Nor is it clear whether these are concerns at all colleges, or just at elite colleges. Shulevitz’s anecdotes come from Brown, Columbia, Smith, and others of that ilk. Does this happen at public universities? Community colleges?

The atmosphere I’ve read about, in Shulevitz’ piece and the many articles about trigger warnings, in no way resembles anything I observed teaching undergraduates over the past several years at New York University. It could be that French-language classes don’t lend themselves to offense, but plenty of French movies do, and I can well remember showing The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob without leading with a trigger warning about the cultural appropriation and slapstick violence that was to come.

College shouldn’t be about making students comfortable, but it also shouldn’t be about making them uncomfortable for discomfort’s sake. The Allan Bloom or Dead Poets Society model of professor-as-provocateur tends to be more about allowing a professor’s ego to express itself than about successfully imparting course-related knowledge.