The new academic year has just begun, and with it, a great uproar about trigger warnings and safe spaces. The University of Chicago, self-proclaimed bastion of “free and open inquiry,” has put its foot down against these bogeymen of today’s higher education in a widely publicized letter to incoming freshmen.

The letter has aroused a predictably wide range of responses, from paeans to the university’s righteousness to outraged condemnations of its insensitivity. Yet these reactions to the August 24 letter fail to assess what the letter is actually about.

College dean Jay Ellison’s note is neither an admonishment nor a political statement. Above all, it is a marketing document that targets not its actual addressees, rising first-years, but the two groups whose cash infusions make the university run: alumni donors and prospective students.