Day 24: The (un)safe spaces of our design

For the past couple of days, my Mercer University colleagues and fellow Maconites have been sharing excerpts from the convocation address by Mercer’s president, Bill Underwood. And rightly so.

President Underwood delivered a message students (and faculty) need to hear, joining a nationwide discussion about the role of higher education in fostering debate and providing safe spaces for students. The key quote, as relayed by The Telegraph:

“It’s not the role of the university to shield you from ideas and opinions that you find disagreeable or even that you find deeply offensive,” he said. “It is our role to to help you learn how to engage productively with those with whom you disagree, and that’s sometimes difficult.”

Hear, hear. I don’t see how anyone can argue with that.

I do worry, a little, about an overcorrection against the safe space phenomenon. It’s very much like the political correctness debate. Laudable goals of sensitivity and inclusiveness sometimes lead to thought policing, which can lead to reactionary and intentional insensitivity and exclusion.

I get that it’s difficult to be sensitive, inclusive and understanding while also challenging each other. But letting others challenge our viewpoints is how we learn and grow and how we come to understand each other.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just agree to do so with a fundamental rule undergirding all of our interactions: “Don’t be an asshole.”

I’d like to go further and say, “Love each other.” Recognize the humanity in each other. The hurt, the fear, the intelligence (that can be hard in election season), the brokenness, the good intentions. The problem with that prescription is that we’ve developed too many definitions of love that aren’t really love, some of them just claims of superiority under the epithet of “tough love.”

So I’ll just stick with the prohibition on assholery.

The safe spaces that really bother me are the ones we create unawares. We surround ourselves with People Like Us. It happens in jobs, in our neighborhoods, in our friendship groups, in our social media. Just look at Blue Feed, Red Feed.

We have the nerve to say that universities are sheltering our kids from opposing opinions? We only deal with opposing opinions when they reach a level of absurdity sufficient to penetrate our bubble (and the absurdity ensures the bubble doesn’t pop).

I suppose the university is one of the few places we are all but forced to confront differing ideas. That is what President Underwood is trying to preserve.

But even here, we sort ourselves. Well before “safe spaces” become a thing, we formed bubbles. Walk into a business school and talk to its students and then go across campus to talk to the students in a sociology department. Groupthink lives in our hallowed halls. Some of that is the nature of the disciplines — what they study and how they do so. But it’s reinforced by the isolation.

When I was an undergrad, I engaged my economics professor and my sociology professor in a debate by proxy. I was the proxy. I’d relay arguments endlessly and try to learn as best I could. For me, this was much more effective than actual debate. I got to know both of them. I could caricature neither them nor their ideas.

I wish I could say I had a prescription for breaking out of these too-safe spaces. But frankly, I’m not sure I want to. Not because I’m afraid of the discomfort. I think I’ve so bought into the caricatures that I don’t respect many of the opposing viewpoints. Isn’t that kind of an asshole thing to say?