IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BUILD SNOWMEN:

The comments come from a surprising source: CNN Host Van Jones, a best-selling author and speaker who served in the Obama administration. As Haidt points out, Jones isn't a hard-nosed conservative. He's a progressive activist, but he sees serious problems with the approach many universities are taking to stifle open discourse and debate.

Jones' comments, made during a panel discussion on safe spaces at the University of Chicago in 2017, have been posted in their entirety below so they can be read in their full context:

I don't like bigots and bullies. I just want to point that out... But I got tough talk for my liberal colleagues on these campuses. They don't tend to like it but I think they like me so I get away with it. I want to push this.

There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus--not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech--"you are an n-word," or whatever--I am perfectly fine with that.

But there's another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that "I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don't like, that's a problem for everybody else including the administration."

I think that is a terrible idea for the following reason: I don't want you to be safe, ideologically. I don't want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different.

I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can't live on a campus where people say stuff you don't like?! And these people can't fire you, they can't arrest you, they can't beat you up, they can just say stuff you don't like- and you get to say stuff back- and this you cannot bear?! [audience applause]

This is ridiculous BS liberals! My parents, and Monica Elizabeth Peak's parents [points to someone in the audience and greets her] were marched, they dealt with fire hoses! They dealt with dogs! They dealt with beatings! You can't deal with a mean tweet?! You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities. [applause]

Van Jones is right that we harm young people by trying to protect them from ideas.

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