"They need to stop equating umbrage with courage."

When you treat the entire world as a threat you lose the ability to do cogent and effective threat analysis.

College Students: Stop Acting Like You're Made of Sugar Candy - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "What happens when a generation grows up being told that nothing is safe enough, not even a walk home from the park? Or that  they should never encounter a bad grade, or mean remark—these things are too wounding? Or that they didn’t lose the game, they are the “8th place winners!?" Here's what happens: At least a portion of them become convinced that they are extremely fragile. They need—they demand—the kind of life-buffers they’ve had since childhood. 

 Which brings us to this remarkable essay by Judith Shulevitz in Sunday’s New York Times. She details the demands students are making to feel "safe" on campus. But she's not talking about physical safety; students want to be safe from debates. Safe from jarring ideas. Safely situated in a "safe place" (terminology previously associated with hurricanes and nuclear war) when some speaker somewhere on campus is even suggesting the possibility that we don't live in a "rape culture." 

...let's start using a term Shulevitz employs, “self infantilizing," to describe what has happened to our young adults when they behave as if they are as helpless and vulnerable as babies, and apparently just as easily entertained. The "safe place" Brown University provided for its students during the rape culture debate in another building was outfitted with coloring books, bubbles, and Play Doh...

I blame a whole culture bent on protecting kids from almost everything: from Pop Tart guns, to red ink on homework, to a spat with their best friend. (Parenting magazine famously told parents to remain close at hand when even their school-age children have playdates because, “You want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”) When you have a culture devoted to seeing danger in what used to just be everyday life, it actually becomes illegal to distinguish between real risks (letting your 5-year-old swim alone, in a quarry, in the dark) and negligible ones (letting your 10-year-old wait in the car, in a safe neighborhood, while you run a short errand). No wonder kids end up at college equally scared of rapists and a discussion of rape culture! They have grown up under the mantra: Everything is dangerous. Now we just have to figure out how to help them realize: Nope. It's not. College students don't need coloring books. They don't need puppy videos. They need to stop equating umbrage with courage. As Winston Churchill said: "We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.""

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas - NYTimes.com: "The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said. Safe spaces 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, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material...

“Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said...

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,”"