By Judith Shulevitz
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Katherine Byron, a senior at Brown University and a
member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a
safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of
trauma.
So when she heard last fall that a student group had
organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the
founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms.
McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed.
“Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s
experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”
Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a
meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H.
Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk
to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.”
Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space”
would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give
people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to
recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles,
Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies,
as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a
junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the
room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen
people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but
after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by
a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,”
Ms. Hall said.
Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction,
increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep
them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of
the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning,
a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to
the presence of potentially disturbing material.
Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist
consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and
lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous
gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism
or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias —
so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid
gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these
little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.
But the notion that ticklish conversations must be
scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you
designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows
that they should be made safer.
This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this
fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against
Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room
on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer
space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows.
The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily
Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that
“making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.”
A junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his
room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous
space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness
alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an
interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for
people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great
mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he
said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt
someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s
also an intellectual space,” he said.
I’m old enough to remember a time when college students
objected to providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed
politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or pieces
of writing may put them in emotional peril. Two weeks ago, students at
Northwestern University marched to protest an article by Laura Kipnis, a
professor in the university’s School of Communication. Professor Kipnis had
criticized — O.K., ridiculed — what she called the sexual paranoia pervading
campus life.
The protesters carried mattresses and demanded that the
administration condemn the essay. One student complained that Professor Kipnis
was “erasing the very traumatic experience” of victims who spoke out. An
organizer of the demonstration said, “we need to be setting aside spaces to
talk” about “victim-blaming.” Last Wednesday, Northwestern’s president, Morton
O. Schapiro, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal affirming his
commitment to academic freedom. But plenty of others at universities are
willing to dignify students’ fears, citing threats to their stability as
reasons to cancel debates, disinvite commencement speakers and apologize for
so-called mistakes.
At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November,
the college censors (a “censor” being more or less the Oxford equivalent of an
undergraduate dean) canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists
threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men. “I’m relieved
the censors have made this decision,” said the treasurer of Christ Church’s
student union, who had pressed for the cancellation. “It clearly makes the most
sense for the safety — both physical and mental — of the students who live and
work in Christ Church.”
A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group
disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having
too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel
“unsafe.”
Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen
McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she
failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an
alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy
Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word”
when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the
uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter
declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all
students.”
“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between
racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of
racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email.
The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while
keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive,
it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to
sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from
unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as
other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual
headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose
climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear
opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how
will they learn to persuade people to join them?
Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech
codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter
enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor
for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few
generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are
anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health
counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be
exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former
president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed.
But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their
parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the
University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although
universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to
do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors.
“Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college
admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed
maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be
protected like children.”
Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized
terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities
are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII
and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don’t create a “hostile
environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment. However,
universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either.
If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues,
history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure
or don’t prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a
protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an
investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely
to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.
The theory that vulnerable students should be guaranteed
psychological security has roots in a body of legal thought elaborated in the
1980s and 1990s and still read today. Feminist and anti-racist legal scholars
argued that the First Amendment should not safeguard language that inflicted
emotional injury through racist or sexist stigmatization. One scholar, Mari J.
Matsuda, was particularly insistent that college students not be subjected to
“the violence of the word” because many of them “are away from home for the
first time and at a vulnerable stage of psychological development.” If they’re
targeted and the university does nothing to help them, they will be “left to
their own resources in coping with the damage wrought.” That might have, she
wrote, “lifelong repercussions.”
Perhaps. But Ms. Matsuda doesn’t seem to have considered
the possibility that insulating students could also make them, well, insular. A
few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the
University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with
since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During
the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the
newspaper’s apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the
phrase “I am Charlie.”
Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, “Being
Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing,” and not everyone has the guts
to do that (although she didn’t use the word guts). She lives under constant
threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened,
too.
A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student
newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure “that others
felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions.” Ms. El Rhazoui’s “relative
position of power,” the writer continued, had granted her a “free pass to make
condescending attacks on a member of the university.” In a letter to the
editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago
French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, “El Rhazoui is an
immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a
journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak
precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat.”
You’d be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the
student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so
overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn’t see that it was Ms. El
Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space.
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