The college world is abuzz with the news that the University of Chicago will not be condoning safe spaces, trigger warnings, or the chasing out of speakers with whom students disagree. Students, parents, professors, and columnists alike have published myriad responses, most either praising the university for its return to common sense, or condemning it for its lack of compassion and progressiveness. A false dichotomy is being proliferated in which one must either support all of the practices banned by UChicago or none. As is often the case, more nuanced views tend to get shouted down.
The grouping of these three practices-- trigger warnings, safe spaces, and censoring speakers-- is inherently odd.
Trigger warnings are an overhyped, somewhat minor act of labeling. They don’t inhibit free speech or academic discovery, and theoretically they even encourage these things by making individuals with trauma feel more safe to participate in discussions. What’s more, they’ve existed in some form for decades, at the least. Professors warning their students about particularly disturbing material is not a new idea. Many professors have done this for their entire careers without causing much of a stir or significantly affecting the state of their colleges. In classes without any kind of trigger warning, students are perfectly capable of looking a work up online to see if it might trigger them, and in classes with trigger warnings, other students are not much affected. So far, the greatest impact of trigger warnings has been the time wasted over debating them.
Safe spaces are a bit more complicated and difficult to deal with. Are the spaces in question classrooms, dorms, clubs, or an entire university? So-called safe spaces have been proposed at all of these levels, and the effect is quite different at each level. I would agree with those who oppose universities or classrooms as safe spaces-- that would defeat the purpose of these institutions as places where our ideas are challenged, unraveled, and redeveloped. Dorms and clubs, however, are a different matter. Clubs and specialty dorms like social justice houses and LGBT houses are entirely opt-in experiences. Dorms, in particular, are a college student’s version of “going home”-- in the same way that we often choose people with whom we feel safe and comfortable to go home to, it’s reasonable for a person to choose a dorm to mimic that home life.
Censoring speakers is on an entirely different level. Unless a person is spewing outright hate speech, censoring them is an attack both on freedom of speech and on academic rigor. Silencing someone because you disagree with them or find them offensive is unacceptable in a democratic society.
Ultimately, education is meant to challenge us. We should encounter new ideas and be forced to defend our own. If we do not emerge from our college experiences with views that are substantially different and more nuanced than views with which we enter, either or education has failed us or we have failed it. Wholesale rejection or acceptance of every social justice policy is a reaction too simplistic to be worthy of the education we have dedicated ourselves to. To maintain the integrity of academy it is essential to walk the narrow and difficult line between making every student feel safe and maintaining intellectual diversity and rigor. Neither of these sides can be ignored.
