On Freedom and Safe Spaces

What is a safe space?

In college I led a discussion group called “WISex” through my campus Christian fellowship. The affectionate acronym stands for “Women’s Identity and Sexuality” and the group was designed for women-identifying students to discuss controversial issues of gender and faith. WISex was a safe space. It was also a space for deep discussion of difficult topics that are too often ignored, especially in the church but also in other intellectual circles, because they are often personally painful, deeply nuanced, and culturally loaded.

To that end, our safe space had rules. For example, “What’s said here stays here, what’s learned here leaves here.” This rule makes a space safe by assuring confidentiality around personal details exchanged, mistakes made, and vulnerabilities revealed. It also encourages engagement outside of the space, by taking its lessons and sharing them with others as long as they are not attached to a specific name or face.

“Make space, take space.” This rule makes a space safe by embracing courage, generosity and mindfulness in discussion. Some are accustomed to being listened to, unaware of the invisible microphone constructed by their background, personality, physical characteristics and social capital. They do well to remember that other voices may not have a volume commensurate with their value. They do well to speak their minds boldly, while remembering to make space for and offer invitations to more pensive perspectives. Those who prefer not to speak may try to remember the importance of their own ideas and that taking space to share is not selfish but a generous effort toward mutual enrichment.

“Assume good intent.” This rule makes a space safe by understanding that as flawed, biased, human people engage in difficult, nuanced conversation with other such creatures, offense will occur. People will be hurt, old wounds may be reopened, mistakes will be made. This rule reminds the person who is hurt that their pain, though legitimate and real, was likely not a result of an intentional attack but an unfortunate lack of knowledge or sensitivity. While such a mistake illuminates human brokenness, it does not indicate incorrigible personal evil or the close of a conversation.

Assuming good intent in a safe space allows the injured to say: I see that you are human — I am human too. You should know that you have hurt me, and I trust that you did not mean to. Perhaps in the future you could understand the impact of that point of view, of that phrasing, of that assumption and choose to say something differently. I do not want to censor or control you, but allow you to see the ways that we are connected, how your words land in my heart and mind. Of course you are still free to say and believe whatever you think is right. But you should know, and I trust you to handle the truth, that if you exercise that freedom in this way, you will hurt me. And our relationship, which I value highly, may become fractured.

The person who has caused offense, upon receipt of grace in a place of safety may then have space to acknowledge both that they might be wrong in some way and that they are still valued, that their voice matters. They have been given an opportunity to learn and to foster meaningful relationships in which difficult dialogue may flourish. They are safe, within the limits of the human capacity for grace and compassion, to speak without fear that they will be reduced to a sarcastic tweet, the baggage of a political monolith, a target for those who are slow to listen and quick to judge. They are free to speak, empowered by the knowledge that those who hear are composed of flesh and blood and not of straw.

I am bothered by the welcome letter sent to the University of Chicago Class of 2020. I believe that it was well-intentioned, that the University is trying to say that all viewpoints are valued and welcome here. I respect the desire to protect the preeminent value of democracy and intellectual exchange that is the freedom to speak an unpopular opinion without fear of forcible silence imposed by a tyrannical majority. Indeed, several paragraphs of the letter seem a lovely tribute to that value. But by saying that in service of this value the University does not “support so–called trigger warnings” or “condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” I fear that a deep misunderstanding is at work.

I worry that the University is mining words that are going the deformed, nuance-stripped way of phrases like “politically correct” and using them to set up a punching bag in front of which to posture, to market our particular brand of intellectual inquiry. Such unnecessarily inflammatory, politically loaded language in a letter ostensibly meant to welcome 18-year-olds to a new chapter of their intellectual and personal lives disturbs me. It sounds like a passive aggressive note of hostility in an otherwise blandly cheerful opening number. It reads like a crude note taped to the door “BEWARE: Free and Rigorous Discourse!” that makes you wonder if the welcome mat is booby trapped — though of course, you know that it is not.

I do believe that the University means to encourage students to think carefully, but instead they have told students that their feelings do not matter. It is the implicit establishment of this false dichotomy that troubles me most.

I believe that truly deep and “rigorous” thinking about many subjects examined in college can (should?) trigger deep and unruly emotions. I have been weeping over my American history textbooks since we studied the Civil War in seventh grade. Of course, I am a highly sensitive person. Humans do terrible things to one another and there is great suffering in the world. Art, literature, philosophy, political theory, all grapple with this reality intensely and they should. If the University wants to say that this grappling should not be avoided, I agree. But the choice to attack trigger warnings and safe spaces misses the mark.

At their core, I believe the request for trigger warnings and safe spaces on campus asks professors, administrators and fellow students to recognize their colleagues as fully human beings. Trigger warnings are about more than sheer intellectual disagreement and academic freedom. The Life of the Mind is a grand UChicago slogan but we are not disembodied brains. To pretend that we are does a great disservice to that which makes any of this worth learning. Individual expression is deeply important, but so is recognizing that we are all members of a community. Just because it is a challenge to hold these values in tension does not mean that we should immediately leap to sacrificing one at the altar of the other.

Students are asking to bring all of themselves to the learning experience. They are asking for an acknowledgement that they or the girl at the next desk has suffered, asking for a moment to allow her to prepare to feel that pain again as she reads about the genocide of her ancestors, as she reads a rape case in law school and remembers herself as the victim. They are asking that she feel supported by her classmates and professors as she untangles the knotted mass of emotions and experiences that enrich her ideas and receives new ideas to inform her emotions. They are asking for a space for her to go to recover her mental and emotional strength so she can come to class again tomorrow ready to engage.

I am not concerned here with the particular efficacy of specific policies. I know that most are open to abuse and extremes of one direction or another. I think mandatory trigger warning policies would likely prove shortsighted and a ban on such warnings would be deeply problematic. Fortunately, neither policy is in place at the University of Chicago. In fact, by many accounts the University has made a reasonably good start at fostering “safe spaces” and many professors respond to their students with empathy and compassion. I certainly do not think professors should be forced to teach or not teach certain material. I do not think disagreement and discomfort are inherently bad and I think academic freedom is incredibly important. Maybe there never can be anything like a truly safe space. Maybe there are better ways to achieve the goals at issue here. I do think they often lose something in translation to an institutional setting. But I suggest that the barbed language of this letter sets up an unnecessary conflict between freedom and holistic well-being, as though they are not deeply intertwined.

It is true that discomfort is inevitable and often productive. But suffering for its own sake is not virtuous. I resist the cynical and circular reasoning that says that the “real” world is a difficult and terrifying place and therefore attempts to alleviate pain and achieve compassionate connection within the university are unrealistic and foolhardy. Often, the students who request trigger warnings do so because they know all too well how much suffering the world contains and they want a chance to take a deep breath before plunging back into the how and why. Most of these requests are not about absenting oneself from learning. And if they are about taking a step back sometimes, what of it? The University has complained about spaces to retreat as though a good general does not know when to pull his soldiers back. The university is a contest of ideas, to be sure, but it need not be a bloodbath. We want students to learn to fight for what they believe in. Yet, while refusing unequivocally to retreat makes for a glorious ending to a Greek tragedy, it is often unnecessary and unwise. Those soldiers do not go on to change the world.

Let us not be so quick to dismiss these students as ostriches in the sand, burying their heads under their feather pillows and refusing to acknowledge the “real world.” Let us take a moment to consider that the quintessential gift of college students is the youthful idealism that says something is wrong in the world — but perhaps it could be better. That says perhaps we could begin in this world we inhabit, the university, and create invitations for people to be kinder, safer, wiser and more thoughtful about what they choose to say.

I am saddened by complaints about coddled millennials. We scorn those who promote “handholding policies,” forgetting that human connection allows societies to flourish and makes individuals feel that life is worth living, that more is won than lost when we are palm to palm. We demand that young people be thick-skinned and we forget that it is human to bleed, that those who have lost the ability to feel have lost a tremendous source of information and that numbness to pain is a very dangerous condition. Instead of telling students to buckle down and strap on their heavy, cumbersome armor, perhaps we could listen when they suggest we put our knives away as we talk about this.

We mock college students as childish when we imagine them reaching out for puppies and bubbles and coloring books in spaces of rest, seeking reminders of a time before they glimpsed how much pain a human heart could bear. Yet we forget that a safe and happy child is perhaps the most inquisitive and imaginative creature known to man. If safety must come at the expense of freedom, I am not sure we are talking about the same thing. That certainly seems an unwise bargain to make.

I believe it is not safety that silences, but the hopeless feeling that there is no one who will care to hear. I believe students want to learn to speak boldly, but they also want to learn to listen well and to practice emotional intelligence. Let us not slam the door on this idea in the name of all the others.