Thoughts on the relation between academic freedom and safe spaces? NYT Op Ed Article (Note: discussions on sexual assault and racism)

I'll bite. As an aside, I find your caution (and quite a lot of TiA's mythological tales surrounding the Fempire) kind of funny.

With regards to

a great deal of people need to talk about that for people to understand what a Safe Space really is.

you are assuming that there is a single definition of what a safe space (no caps) is. There isn't one; even on my own campus, a safe space can describe many different configurations. I've been in, and helped maintain, several spaces. Each of them was different since they were set up to do different things, but if there was any sort of commonality it was this: people were encouraged to talk about the issue(s) that the group was set up to tackle, and they had some assurance of support for voicing their ideas.

Sarkeesian is not "sequestering" herself in safe spaces. There are certain places, especially within feminist or academic thought, where the "criticisms" raised by certain groups will not be regarded very highly, simply because they completely fail to understand her premise and the body of feminist/critical theory scholarship that her work draws on. In fact, Tropes v.s. Women in Videogames is an incredibly basic series that is operating at introductory levels, as in, it applies simple feminist media/critical theory concepts of the sort that would fit right into a college freshman's first-semester class. Her points are completely uncontroversial as far as media criticism is concerned. I understand how from the outside it appears dismissive, but really it's more that her (enormous and disproportionately hateful) body of critics are drawing spurious arguments that have been dismissed since about the 70s.

/r/SRSDiscussion Thread Parent