Part of the thing about the safe space movement at universities is that it's happening at just about the same time that universities have just about completed their transition from educational institutions into corporations. If you think about them as any other corporation, they are just doing their best to keep the customers coming.
Would you want to pay money to faculty who challenges the consumer's assumptions, or do you want to build a strong lifestyle brand, which in turn drives future "donations", sports income. Every other corporation is giving us information tailored to our desires, so why would a university want to risk the corporate enterprise on antagonistic professors with differing opinions? That just devalues the brand.
Note that the OP has been a "professor" at Duke for 20 years, but has essentially no job security. He's basically an independent contractor in the gig economy. That's kinda common in the community college level, but it looks like it's finally made its way to the elite schools too. We used to have secretaries for professors, but now the colleges have secretaries for the deputy assistant administrators.
So to me the trigger warning, safe space culture wars are only a symptom of the problem that our universities have become mirrors of the large corporations.
I don't know about the particular case in the article, but I thought the tradition of tenure was partly to permit professors to pursue currently-unpopular ideas, like perhaps this person was doing at Duke. I didn't know a prominent university would have a non-tenure-track professor teaching for 20 years. What is that hefty tuition paying for?
I've talked with some tenured professors who hire adjuncts, and they feel bad about the situation, but those individual professors had no say over it. Perhaps if entire faculties came together and petitioned, at least at the wealthier places, universities might spring for all instructors being tenure-track professors (assisted by grad students).
Would you want to pay money to faculty who challenges the consumer's assumptions, or do you want to build a strong lifestyle brand, which in turn drives future "donations", sports income. Every other corporation is giving us information tailored to our desires, so why would a university want to risk the corporate enterprise on antagonistic professors with differing opinions? That just devalues the brand.
Note that the OP has been a "professor" at Duke for 20 years, but has essentially no job security. He's basically an independent contractor in the gig economy. That's kinda common in the community college level, but it looks like it's finally made its way to the elite schools too. We used to have secretaries for professors, but now the colleges have secretaries for the deputy assistant administrators.
So to me the trigger warning, safe space culture wars are only a symptom of the problem that our universities have become mirrors of the large corporations.