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Christopher Cahill
undergrad, programmer, economist-to-be, data aficionado, political misanthrope

UChicago: The Irony of Promoting the Marketplace of Ideas with Right-wing Rhetoric

Everyone who knows me knows I disdain most people. Today, the University of Chicago was the most recent source of my misanthropy.

The University of Chicago, basking in its reputation of being a place for the free exchange of ideas, decided to do something it thought was ‘edgy.’ They thought they’d take a stab at the PC left-of-center folk that seem to inhabit, wait for it, all centers of education these days.

They specifically said that college was a place for learning, not for:

  1. trigger warnings
  2. safe spaces
  3. micro-aggressions

Hm, does the University of Chicago know what the fuck any of those things are?

  1. A trigger warning is a visual/textual warning put before a work that contains something sensitive, like rape, death, or violence. It’s not saying: ‘don’t even look at this because it’s violent! No debate here please!’ It’s simply a warning for something that might, wait for it, trigger someone because it’s grotesque. Can it be abused? Sure, I’ve seen trigger warnings for water, but trigger warnings are not causing a disconnect between large segments of the population; they are instead, helping, for example, rape victims from unintentionally stirring up hurtful memories.
  2. Does UChicago even know what a micro-aggression is? It doesn’t seem like it. A micro-aggression isn’t a way to derail debate; it’s a legitimate complaint about the ridiculous comments that sexual/gender/racial/ethnic minorities face often. Yes, some people, like this Oberlin kid, take it too far. But, the vast majority are legitimate, and these don’t derail meaningful debate frequently.
  3. Safe spaces: these are where young latte-toting communists go and plot down the US, right? Wrong, though weirdly enough that sounds like the neoliberal UChicago echo chamber that was involved in the US’s right-wing dictator takeover of Chile. Woops, sorry not sorry (ok, ad hominem, even by my tastes). Safe spaces are literally places for minorities to be themselves without pressure from outside society, one that generally is hostile to minorities in some way or another. Does this create an echo chamber? Yes. But is breaking up black, gay, trans, etc. student groups really going to bring about societal harmony?

Excuse me while I slaughter:

  1. What about political groups? Safe spaces for people of color and queer/trans people are too much for the University of Chicago, but Democrats and Republicans can have their groups where they literally sit in a circle-jerk and create an echo chamber. These circle-jerks are okay though, right? In all fairness, I do think that having political party groups on campus adds to the experience, but talking about a self-challenging learning environment and derailing safe spaces but not clubs specifically tailored to those of a certain political ideology is idiotic.
  2. Religious groups get their equivalent of safe spaces, no? They get a place to do things, some of which clearly border on political or communal, and it’s not a problem. I’m not saying that Jewish and Muslim groups aren’t there for religious reasons, because they are. But, there’s no talk about Jewish or Muslim groups making an Israel-Palestine echo chamber, even though they definitely do (hint: look at the demographic makeup of pro-Palestine events vs. pro-Israel events and their sponsors on campus).
  3. Speaking from my own experience at Penn, where I and many of my friends are involved in the LGBT community, there is a suffocatingly progressive faction of the community that take it, in my opinion, too far and make the root cause of everything neoliberal imperialism. But the fraction of overzealous people is small and only a fraction of a small minority of students (the LGBT population). If the LGBT population at Penn is roughly 1/5 of the overall population (and the black/Hispanic fractions are all, unfortunately, quite small) I doubt that societal disconnect and debate is being heavily influenced by the most radical of those respective groups and their safe spaces. On the flip side, a sizable fraction of the student body now has a safe space, and if you think for a hot second that queer people and racial/ethnic minorities don’t experience discomfort daily in regular society, you’re mistaken.
  4. The sad (or not-so-sad) truth is that most college students at wealthy, prestigious institutions think alike. At Penn, Hillary dominates, and, a little while back during the Republican Primary, Kasich won by a landslide among those on the center-right. Wait: wealthy, secular young people are socially liberal and fiscally moderate? You don’t say!

Sadly, if this is real, the University of Chicago took a largely right-leaning talking point, internalized it haphazardly, and then used it as a diagnosis for our societal disconnect and ill-formed debate culture. Is a small minority of people making the learning environment worse? Certainly; only recently at Penn, we had the CIA Director who had to leave because he was heckled by people. That’s bad. We’re all in agreement. But is removing safe spaces going to really get rid of those people? Likewise, trigger warnings and micro-aggressions are altogether unrelated to the marketplace of ideas.

I’m saddened that the University of Chicago picked out these three new phenomena, especially at a time when the marketplace of ideas does indeed face many real threats.