A student asked this week if I’d occasionally post here what I’ve been reading; I’ll often mention something in class that, in the midst of the conversation, she doesn’t have the change to jot down. I said, “Sure.”

This weekend I’ll be reading Marilynne Robinson’s new essay in Harper’s, “Save Our Public Universities.” She hits similar notes in her latest, quite marvelous, book The Givenness of Things, which I read over winter break.

Also in the new Harper’s is a short piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, writing about his problem with “safe spaces” in American colleges and universities. Here’s an excerpt.

Ultimately, the quest for guaranteed emotional security and a coerced or rigged affirmation in conditions of real or imagined oppression, while understandable, does little to alter the status quo. On the contrary, that quest painfully concedes the point that inequality is permanent. Real safety and freedom — which is to say, full participation in a society in which one has an equal stake, and not merely a symbolic shelter — requires systemic support, but it also needs personal imagination and courage. At the very least, it requires the courage to be uncomfortable and the imagination to see ourselves as strong.