Her first question is easy to answer.
"What in your upbringing told you that safety is the highest of values?"
Lawyers and insurance companies. Risk taking is bad for the bottom line. The dilemma is that risk taking is one of the best ways for humans to grow and express themselves.
There is some research now about how we're less able to assess risks. If you've been warned about everything your whole life, how do you develop your own judgment?
My kid is 20 now. I used to tell him what the risks were but I usually let him make his own decisions. He turned out fine. And he's still got about 5 years before his judgement skills mature.

Read this...

And after I told him about the risks, I would offer advice on how to handle them. That's an important thing too.

This starts in kindergarten and flows all the way through college. Even before the lawyers get to you the school teachers are there. They teach that there is no independent reality or truth, only applied power. There is no general morality, only what you can get away with. So why not lie, cheat, or steal . . . as long as you can get away with it.

On the far side of this argument against social justice:

May we burn crosses in front of dorms now?
May we threaten people with assault (sexual or otherwise) if they disagree with us?
Are we expected to sit by and let people bully openly, in the belief their opinion is shared by all?

Here's a thought, maybe it is not bullying to inform somebody they're creating an atmosphere of discriminatory treatment that allows bullying of minorities. It's a very subtle thing.

Or maybe it is, but since when has being a wimp worked around bullies?

In fact, I had to take a situation all the way up to a college VP and point out how their statement actually encouraged bullying of disabled students-- it was actually written so teachers could bully students that stuttered or had other communication handicaps (by deeming them inappropriate or disruptive) and said NOTHING about say, students threatening other students in the classroom.

It was vague and left to the teacher. In one case, a teacher used this to vindictively control me to cover his butt for not complying with accommodations, quoting the standard of conduct at me as proof he could treat me like crap just because I had a communication handicap he could deem disruptive at any time.

That situation had been resolved (he was stupid enough to cc the Dean and others on it), but not without a lot of irreparable damage to my education.

Had I been an younger student-- not in my thirties, I would have been shattered and considered suicide because I had never gotten in trouble before let alone had a teacher threaten me like that before.

Peggy Noonan obviously does not remember being 18 years old. It's very different from being 20, 22, 24.

End result: The statement was simplified to something approaching common sense that would work for all students, simply saying teachers should call in security if they were really concerned about student conduct-- rather than outlining endless, nebulous rules that would make students feel teachers could and would police HOW they communicated and threaten them with expulsion if they didn't "behave" according to the teacher's whim.

If that makes me a bully, I'm dang glad of it because I know if I saved some students from going through the same thing, I may have saved some lives and also prevented professors from using the rules to control and then manipulate students into sexual relationships. (This teacher also had a prior history of sexual relationships with students. Apparently he got tenure anyway.)

Thanks Radwaste. That's a great article.

I especially liked the debunking (see Clinton's email server debacle, liars about gov't spying ability, "green" subsidies, analysis of climate data, etc.) of our assumption that if the MSM does it's job that "The truth will win out.". "The people" just don't care.

"Implicit in calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our First Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our liberty. The belief is that liberty can be preserved as long as men freely speak their minds; that there is no tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the press; and that the truth need only be disclosed for the culprits to be shamed. The people will act, and the truth shall set us, and keep us, free."

I liked your post, je.

FWIW, here's what Miss Manners wrote about PC-ness in an op-ed, more than 20 years ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/20/opinion/dialogue-speech-on-campus-say-the-right-thing-or-else-attack-ideas-not-people.html

First half:

WASHINGTON— Can the university, with its special trust of protecting free speech, be hampered by the restrictions of civility? What kind of a frill is etiquette, anyway, for those in the noble pursuit of truth?

These questions are raised whenever a loose-tongued student turns publicly nasty. When Brown University recently expelled such a student, many argued that all restrictions of free speech are intolerable in the university. Brown's president, Vartan Gregorian, agreed with that premise and neatly reclassified the offensive speech as behavior.

But the premise is wrong.

The special trust of a university is not to foster unlimited speech: It is to foster unlimited inquiry. And totally free speech inhibits rather than enhances the free exchange of ideas.

The law cannot restrict such speech without violating our constitutional rights. But etiquette, the extra-legal regulative system that seeks to avert conflict before it becomes serious enough to call in the law, can and does. You may have a legal right to call your mother an idiot, or somebody else's mother a slut, but you won't if you know what's good for you.

Nor could you convince many people that the controversy that such remarks are likely to provoke will lead to advances in knowledge.

The university needs to enforce rules banning speech that interferes with the free exchange of ideas. It must protect the discussion of offensive topics but not the use of offensive manners. It must enable people freely to attack ideas but not one another...

(snip)

I don't know if she's said anything about "trigger warnings" in the last year, though.

"The university needs to enforce rules banning speech that interferes with the free exchange of ideas."

That is the exact opposite of what most universities are doing. When you assume your view points are the only valid ones repressing other people's is a reasonable objective. And the ivory tower is full of authoritarians who think they know better than everyone else.

The last thing SJWs want is freely exchanged ideas.