There’s something basically right with the idea that universities (in the social sciences and humanities) should be in the business of making their students uncomfortable with their preconceptions, obligng them to examine their own and others’ ideas forcefully, and getting them to acknowledge a la Max Weber that there are awkward facts for every political position. But there’s also something fundamentally wrong with the claim that the ideal of academic freedom and the idea of the safe space are opposed to each other.
One of these days, we may see Susanne Lohmann’s book on how universities think. But in the meantime, there are some helpful insights in the essays that are supposed to provide one bit or another of her argument. In particular, this piece, which argued, a decade ago, that the university was nothing more and nothing less than a congeries of safe spaces for faculty, who otherwise would be at each others’ throats.
The University of Chicago sent a dizzying letter to its freshman class last week, pledging its allegiance to two principles: academic freedom and freedom of expression. The letter expressed this commitment by denouncing “so-called trigger warnings” and “intellectual ‘safe spaces.’” To those unfamiliar with the UChicago’s abysmal campus climate, a strong stance against echo chambers may seem reasonable. But marginalized students know that this declaration ignores the real problems on campus: sexual assault, racial profiling, and other troubling issues.
I would know. During my four years as an undergraduate at UChicago from 2011 to 2015, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the university’s willful ignorance of students’ concerns, especially students of color. As a first-generation black student, I needed safe spaces like the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs — not to “hide from ideas and perspectives at odds with my own,” but to heal from relentless hate and ignorance, to hear and be heard. My ideas were always challenged, but never my humanity. I mattered.
Full of robust dialogue, safe spaces are not a bubbled-wrapped echo chamber, but a places where “civility and mutual respect” actually matter. Though spacious, the multicultural student affairs office was always full of students sharing their struggles and grappling with oppression. Underfunded and understaffed, it was a house-turned-sanctuary for students and student groups alike. I even slept there during a particularly brutal finals week. I, like many other students, wouldn’t have survived UChicago without this place to call my home.
Today, news broke that the University of Chicago had issued a letter to all incoming Freshmen warning that the school is not a “safe space” and that students should expect to be “challenged”. Most notably, UofC came out against the use of “trigger warnings”, brief content advisories that sometimes are placed on syllabi or lecture slides to alert students to potentially upsetting material.