* From a Tribune editorial on free speech issues at college campuses…

There is a lot to be said for making people aware of the ways in which their words and deeds can do harm. No one wants to go back to the days when casual expressions of racial prejudice were common, or when women were mocked for taking places that should have gone to men, or when some professors made passes at students.

But it’s important not to go so far in protecting undergraduates that they lose the spontaneous and open interactions they need to understand the world and the society in which they live. An education that spares students from unwanted challenges to their thinking is not much of an education.

Luckily, there’s pushback against this trend. University of California regents issued a report deploring anti-Semitism but rejected demands to include all forms of anti-Zionism in the condemnation. When students at Emory University protested messages in support of Donald Trump chalked on campus sidewalks as an attempt to intimidate minority groups, the school president heard them out but took no action.

A female undergraduate at Harvard wrote an article that assailed the prevailing atmosphere there, recalling a class in which one student said “she would be unable to sit across from a student who declared that he was strongly against abortion” and a discussion in which she was rebuked for citing a Bible verse because it violated a “safe space.”

* The basic counter-argument to the Tribune is that since individual students pay mandatory tuition and student fees, then each individual student can dicate what their own personal free association rights are. That counter-argument is completely ludicrous, of course. One person’s “safe space violation” is another person’s right to say what’s on his or her mind in a public place. Plus, there are things like student elections which settle these matters. I’m with the Trib on this one.

Our job as a society is not to pamper folks who incessantly worry about “triggers.” People who demand that society ensures their lives remain pristine and completely unencumbered by challenges and contradictions cannot possibly be catered to because it would never, ever end.

* Now, let’s move on to another Tribune editorial…

On Tuesday, the eight surviving justices of the U.S. Supreme Court supercharged an already white-hot issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. With their 4-4 split but no opinion or other explanation, the justices in effect gave a big but perhaps temporary win to public employees unions. The implications for personal freedom, though, are unfortunate.

At issue in the case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, was whether it’s unconstitutional for public-sector unions to charge “agency fees” — essentially dues — to nonmembers whom they represent but who don’t want to support union activities. […]

The problem with the unions’ position is that it starts and stops with that argument against workers they denigrate as “free riders.” The unions are a lot less eager to talk about workers’ rights to free speech and free association. With Scalia still on the bench, the court might well have undone a 1977 precedent, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, and said the employees’ First Amendment rights are paramount. The court set the table for that new direction when it ruled in a 2014 Illinois case that home caregivers shouldn’t be forced to join a union. That opinion said that “except in perhaps the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

In a meeting with the Tribune Editorial Board before the court heard her case, lead plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs, a third-grade teacher now in her 28th year as an educator, offered a compelling rationale: “The unions call me a free rider. But the benefits they negotiate for me are not worth the moral costs. The defined benefit program and the expense to my community and my nation, and using my money to protect teachers who are ineffective and sometimes abusive in class — this is a liberty issue for me.”

The last time I checked, there are no laws mandating kids attend specific universities nor that people take jobs at unionized public schools.

If college kids don’t like what’s going on, they can organize, they can run for student office, or they can transfer to another school or even drop out. The same goes for teachers who don’t want to contribute their fair share dues.

I seriously doubt that the Tribune would advocate allowing college students to stop paying tuition and fees any time they disagree with something that happened on campus. The same goes for unions. You get a benefit, you pay. Simple.