From Boston to Los Angeles, the term is thrown around with abandon. A visiting speaker is skeptical of “rape culture”? She’s a “threat.” The College Republicans aren’t sure that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman? That’s “violence.” Someone in your philosophy class disagrees with your politics? They’re literally imperiling your “safety.”

At Fusion, Malcom Harris tracks the provenance of this rather peculiar idea. The original “safe spaces,” he writes, were established by gays and lesbians in the mid ’60s and subsequently picked up by feminists who hoped to “distance” themselves “from men and patriarchal thought.” These “spaces,” he notes, “were not entirely “free of internal disagreement,” but they did require their participants to exhibit “a devotion to a common political project” or cause. And “those who attempted to undermine the movement — consciously or unconsciously — would be kept outside.”

Whatever one thinks of their use in these two contexts, it is difficult to imagine any idea that is less compatible with the goals of a university than the establishment of “safe spaces.” One can instinctively understand why the gays of the 1960s would want to conduct conversations away from a hostile world. One can comprehend, too, why they sought refuge in private groups devoted to a common political cause. But students? At a place of learning? That makes no sense at all. Unlike gay bars or feminist workshops, colleges are inherently pluralist, and they cannot therefore devote themselves to “a common political project” or “movement” without abandoning their purpose. At a stretch, there is an argument for permitting the establishment of “safe spaces” within universities — traditionally we call these “clubs” — but there is no case whatsoever for turning the entire place over to a particular set of ideological presumptions and for punishing or excluding those who decline to acquiesce.