This year, the University of Chicago's typically innocuous welcome letter to incoming freshmen was markedly different from those of previous years, namely with it's inclusion of the following passage:
"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own," - John Ellison, Dean of Students
Considering that student activism on college campuses has recently become a hot button issue, the letter by the University of Chicago has not escaped controversy as people have taken to their various forms of social media to either laud or criticize the statement. But despite what seems at surface level to be a school's attempt to reiterate their policies on free speech, the motivation behind the university's actions is a lot deeper.
This past year has been rife with news of large-scale political activism on college campuses that, as in the cases of the University of Missouri and Yale, has ended with changes by the administration. Even here at the University of Southern California, student protests expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement or demanding an increase to the minimum wage for campus workers have become a common occurrence within the past few years.
The statement by the administration of the University of Chicago seems to be a preemptive move to curtail any "controversial" activism on campus and paint activists as fundamentally incompatible with the university's culture of free speech. Now, students who call out instances of institutional racism and sexism on campus and demand changes will be quickly portrayed as opponents of the exchange of free ideas. Rather than respond to and address the concerns of students, the university will now be able to point to this year's welcome letter as to why their hands are tied.
Some have suggested that the recent outcry on college campuses requesting the creation of safe spaces has scared alumni who would otherwise donate to their alma mater, making them afraid that their money would go towards further "coddling" college students. Truly, this mirrors the more general trend of older generations tending to view millennials as "babied" and "thin-skinned". Therefore, by issuing such a public denouncement of trigger warning and safe spaces, the University of Chicago has also been able to reassure their wealthier alumni that their donation money will not go to such "frivolous" causes.
Ultimately, what the University of Chicago and other universities across the country will have to contend with is that by protesting controversial speakers, providing trigger warnings, and demanding the creation of safe spaces, the students too are expressing their right to free speech. Whether the administration chooses to listen to the concerns of its students who are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend college is another story.
By refusing to support safe spaces and trigger warnings, many students will view the university as validating the idea that hateful and dangerous speech always trump individual student safety. Consequently, in the same way that the University of Chicago is now attempting to paint student activists as anti-free speech, so too will current and potential students increasingly view the university as one that cares more about its student's pocketbooks than their safety. And while this may all simply be tied to alumni donations and raising money, it is yet to be seen whether these same students who were told in college that their concerns and fears were invalid will want to donate to their alma maters when they're rich and famous in the future.
