the feminist librarian reads

After all, the people who are promoting these ideas are not, for the most part, trying to stifle free speech; they’re instead trying to create the conditions in which it will flourish. Some of their attempts have, admittedly, been clumsy and excessively punitive. But we should also recognize and respect that many of these campus activists are trying to grapple with a new frontier of bigotry and exclusion — to look beyond the gross legal and institutional prejudice of the Jim Crow, boys-only era of higher education, and instead consider how small, daily, and seemingly innocuous behaviors nevertheless contribute to the present state of racial, gender and class-based exclusion.