In 1978, when I was a freshman at Yale, I watched with very mixed feelings as a student melted down in my political philosophy class. The professor had challenged us to name a proposition that is entirely certain, and a classmate ventured the certainty that we all will die, because everyone had died in the past. Pushing back, he said, “But how do you know?” After all, no amount of knowledge about the past can give any completely certain knowledge about the future. And then my classmate, encountering for the first time the icy Humean logic that ended human epistemological innocence in 1748, began to cry. I didn’t cry, but I felt the shock in the room. This was no “little paradise.”

So it is only fair to warn students and their parents that higher education is not a Disney cruise. Tell them in advance so they can prepare. Not, however, with multiple trigger warnings festooning syllabi. One will suffice:

“Warning: Although this university values and encourages civil expression and respectful personal behavior, you may at any moment, and without further notice, encounter ideas, expressions and images that are mistaken, upsetting, dangerous, prejudiced, insulting or deeply offensive. We call this education.”