Safe Spaces On Campus Beyond Freedom of Speech

Students in Missouri, who last week brought about the resignation of the president of the university, camped out in tents on campus. During one of the protests, they declared the area a “safe space,” requesting via Twitter that the media not enter in order to protect it from “disingenuous and twisted narratives.”

The media blockade has sparked a debate as to whether the students violated freedom of speech and the right to information. Furthermore, the controversy has split opinions in response to racist actions on university grounds into two opposing camps. The first of these brands the young students as “spoiled,” accusing them of not wanting to listen to opposing views, and condemning the trend that in recent years has led to film screenings and speakers being censured because the students did not agree with their views. The second camp wants to separate discussions about limits to freedom of speech from the debate about tolerance of racist actions being reported from inside the universities.

At Yale, a controversy arose after the administration sent a “potentially offensive” message to students about Halloween costumes. At Princeton, students blocked rapper Big Sean’s graduation speech because they claimed his lyrics were misogynistic. At Harvard, a professor of law reported that he could not mention rape cases in class because of the risk it might “bring back” traumatic memories. In Colorado, students requested that the film “Stonewall” was not shown because, in their opinion, it does not adequately represent the role of African-Americans in the gay rights movement. And in Missouri, a teacher wrote that he had heard the “N-word” (referring to the derogatory term “nigger”) “too many times to keep count.”

In all these cases, the students have defended the existence of “safe spaces” in universities. The concept originated in the U.S. in the 1960s in bars and premises where the gay community, which was persecuted by the law, could gather. As the author Malcolm Harris writes in [a post for] Fusion, the feminist movement subsequently adopted the model by creating meeting and discussion areas. “A safe space was not free from internal disagreement, but it did mean a devotion to a common political project,” he explains. “Those who attempted to undermine the movement — deliberately or not — would be kept outside.”

This idea would have justified the decision of the Missouri students to expel an ESPN reporter covering the attendance of football team members in the protest, even though this went against the limits of freedom of speech.

American society provides the most support to the right to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups — 67 percent of the population are in agreement — or to insult their beliefs and religion — with 77 percent in agreement, according to the latest survey of global attitudes by the Pew Research Center. The average in the rest of the world is 35 percent in both cases.

But there are some who hold a different interpretation. Jamelle Bouie, a journalist for Slate, recalled in an interview on NPR that during his time at university, “there were things I did not do and places I did not go because I just didn’t want to have to deal with the possibility of being faced with a racist slur.” To those who respond that students like those at Missouri and Yale should “toughen up,” Bouie asks them to “imagine what it would be like to be at a place [the university] that is functionally your home” and not be able to enjoy it “because you’re worried about someone using words that come with an implicit threat.”

Bouie refers to those who have accused the students of Missouri and Yale of “militarizing” the use of safe spaces and of starting up a “new intolerance of student activism,” as Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic. A first editorial of The Wall Street Journal described the students as “Little Robespierres.” A second reported that the mentality of the new generation “threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning” and that “as liberal adults abdicate, the kids take charge on the campus.” “Whatever one thinks of their use in these two contexts, it is difficult to imagine any idea that is less compatible with the goals of a university,” says the conservative magazine The National Review in an article entitled “Silly Student Protestors Have It Wrong.”

“The conversation about freedom of speech has sort of taken away from the fact that you have, at multiple selective, predominantly white institutions, minority students — and predominantly blacks — saying, we do not feel welcome on these campuses,” adds Bouie. Agreeing with him, the writer Roxane Gay in The New York Times defends freedom of speech even when it is used in order to insult, but says that this “does not guarantee freedom from consequence.” Gay regrets that “rather than examine why the activists needed safe space, most people wrapped themselves in the Constitution…”

From social networks to newspaper editorials, the debate that began in Ferguson and has arrived at the university campus is still valid after more than a week of protests and without the two warring parties agreeing on what must be resolved first: the presence of students denouncing racism or their interpretation of safe spaces and the consequences for freedom.