By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Read through any contemporary account of American
on-campus silliness, and one word will pop out at you from the pages: “safe.”
Up and down the country, the term is en
vogue. At Yale, students are worried about the effects that insensitive
Halloween costumes might have upon their “security.” At Colorado College,
enrollees are concerned that the screening of a pro-gay film will put their
“well-being,” their “identity,” and their “safety” at risk, if not inflict
“violence” upon their bodies. At Wesleyan, undergraduates were so outraged by
an opinion column in their university newspaper that they tried to shut it down
on the grounds that its editors had failed to “provide a safe space for the
voices of students of color.”
From Boston to Los Angeles, this conceit is thrown around
with abandon. A visiting speaker is skeptical of “rape culture”? She’s a
“threat.” The College Republicans aren’t sure that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman?
That’s “violence.” Someone in your philosophy class disagrees with your
politics? They’re literally imperiling your “safety.”
At Fusion,
Malcom Harris tracks the provenance of this rather peculiar idea. The original
“safe spaces,” he writes, were established by gays and lesbians in the mid ’60s
and subsequently picked up by feminists who hoped to “distance” themselves
“from men and patriarchal thought.” These “spaces,” he notes, “were not
entirely free of internal disagreement,” but they did require their participants to exhibit “a devotion to a common
political project” or cause. And “those who attempted to undermine the movement
— consciously or unconsciously — would be kept outside.”
Whatever one thinks of their use in these two contexts,
it is difficult to imagine any idea that is less compatible with the goals of a
university. One can instinctively
understand why the gays of the 1960s would want to conduct conversations away
from a hostile world. One can comprehend, too, why they sought refuge in
private groups devoted to a common political cause. But students? At a place of
learning? That makes no sense at all. Unlike gay bars or feminist
workshops, colleges are inherently pluralist, and they cannot therefore devote
themselves to “a common political project” or “movement” without abandoning
their purpose. At a stretch, there is an argument for permitting the
establishment of “safe spaces” within
universities — traditionally we call these “clubs” — but there is no case
whatsoever for turning the entire place
over to a particular set of ideological presumptions and for punishing or
excluding those who decline to acquiesce.
And make no mistake: This is exactly what those crying
“safe space!” are suggesting that we do. At Mizzou, the protesting students did
not hope merely to expel their critics from their private meetings, but to
remove them from public ground. At
Yale, the shriekers were not asking for a room in which to hold a “politically
correct” Halloween party, but for the entire
campus to conform to their preferences. When Christina Hoff Sommers visits
Oberlin, her detractors do not contend that she is wrong, but that she should not have been invited in the first
instance. Put simply, those who have taken to shouting “safe space” are
guilty of an egregious category mistake. In pursuit of political power, they
have adopted a set of rules that were designed for private groups and attempted
to impose them on everybody.
Unsurprisingly, this development has yielded all manner
of confusions. Because there are no established ideological parameters on a
college campus — because, that is, the “spaces” there have no clear walls —
there are no objective means by which we might judge what is “safe” to say and
what is not. If, as one student at Yale put it recently, “offense” is simply
what “hurts,” then everybody has a heckler’s veto simply by virtue of their
capacity to feel. On this rationale, the Christian upset by the visit of a
pro-choice speaker could just as easily claim to be “unsafe” as could the
feminist vexed by the arrival of Rick Santorum. On this rationale, no college
president in the country can be secure in his position, liable as he is to be
accused on a moment’s notice of having fostered an “unsafe” environment for his
students. On this rationale, there is not a single topic of debate that his
immune from the dissenter’s howl. Up goes the hand; out comes the word; down
comes the curtain.
Americans have long drawn a clear distinction between
speech and violence, the general understanding in this country being that
abstract expression may only be regulated when it is extremely likely that it
will lead to imminent criminal behavior. The suggestion that one man’s
political opinions can meaningfully impinge upon another’s “safety” all but
explodes that distinction, thereby conflating intrinsically intellectual concepts such as “upset,”
“discomfort, “hurt,” and “irritation” with intrinsically physical concepts such as “violence,” “security,” and “sanctuary.”
In the immediate term, it may be tempting to merely chuckle at those indulging
in this conflation: There is, I think, only one reasonable response to a person
who believes that your hypotheses are threatening his physical wellbeing, and
that is to laugh in his face until all of the air has left your lungs. In the
long term, though, the trend is a dangerous one, for while the kids running
around the quadrangles of Yale and Wesleyan may be incorrigibly silly, the
ancient ideas upon which they are resting that silliness are once again gaining
ground, and, as history teaches us over and over again, there are no more
dangerous or unsafe spaces than those in which the censors and the mobs are
permitted to roam with impunity.
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