College Campuses Should Not Be Safe Spaces

Last September, in a speech announcing his return to the political fray, former President Barack Obama charged President Trump with practicing “the politics of fear and resentment.” The address drew loud acclaim from Obama’s audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as from the broader world of American higher education, where Trump is held mostly in disdain.

But our campuses practice their own brand of fear and resentment, under the doctrine of “safe spaces.” It doesn’t seek to seal us off from immigrants or Muslims, two of Trump’s favorite targets. Instead, it aims to build a wall against beliefs and remarks that might injure or harm us.

The most recent example comes from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Chancellor Carol L. Folt removed the last remains of its “Silent Sam” Confederate memorial. In a message that simultaneously announced her resignation, Folt said she was acting to protect the safety of the UNC community.

“The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment,” Folt wrote. “No one learns at their best when they feel unsafe.”

The Rise and Fall of Silent Sam

Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. And in January 2019 the campus’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, removed the statue’s pedestal and other remnants. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.

• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Sparked a Backlash. Now a Judge Has Overturned the Deal.
• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Was Reached Quickly. The Blowback Might Last Longer.
• UNC Will Give Silent Sam to a Confederate Group — Along With a $2.5-Million Trust

Folt cited an independent panel of safety experts, who warned in November that the monument threatened to spark continued “chaos and disorder.” And surely the university has a duty to safeguard people from the kind of violence that broke out last summer, after demonstrators pulled Silent Sam off its pedestal.

But it has no duty to protect people from ideas they find offensive or distasteful. Most of the protesters have insisted that the monument — not the controversy over it — endangers their safety. Their concern isn’t the potential violence triggered by Silent Sam; instead, it’s that the monument itself is a form of violence against them.

Let me be clear: I regard Silent Sam as a symbol of white supremacy, erected to whitewash the Confederacy and to prop up racial segregation. I supported its removal to a campus history center, as Folt proposed last year, where its full story could be told. But that wasn’t enough for many critics of the center, who claimed that the simple presence of the statue — no matter the context — would make them feel unsafe.

“This is a public university, and its responsibility is to be a welcoming environment, a safe environment for all of our students,” one demonstrator said in December, calling on the university to “get rid of the statue forever.”

But where does that end? It doesn’t. Members of any group on a campus could claim that a given symbol threatens their safety; and under the safety-first doctrine, the symbol would have to go. Students at the University of Texas at Austin — which moved its statue of Jefferson Davis to a history center in 2017 — could demand the statue’s destruction. Ditto for any historical remnants of genocidal regimes in Germany, Cambodia, or Turkey.

Of course those symbols should make us feel bad. But that’s the worst possible reason to rid ourselves of them.

In 2016 a group of students at Occidental College argued that the American flag endangered their safety. “On a campus that proclaims itself, time and again, to be diverse, equitable, and safe for all of its students, the display of American flags covering the entire academic quad disproved that proclamation,” the Coalition for Diversity and Equity declared, denouncing a 9/11 memorial on the campus. “For us, the flag is a symbol of institutionalized violence.”

They’re entitled to their views of the flag, of course, and they have every right to protest it. But they have no right to be insulated from it, simply because it hurts their feelings. Once you enshrine that kind of safety as the sine qua non of education, you can censor or eliminate anything that might provoke uneasiness, anxiety, or discomfort.

You also engender an environment of flaccid group-think, where everyone toes the party line. That’s why many students and faculty members report that they censor themselves, biting their tongues instead of saying what they actually think. Why risk it? It’s so much easier to smile and nod, to go along so we get along.

But that’s anathema to education, which requires us to confront ideas and practices that are different from our own. We can’t do that if we create our own culture of fear and resentment, which makes our classrooms and our campuses unsafe for real learning.

I learned that firsthand when I taught for a morning several years ago as part of the Bard Prison Initiative, which provides undergraduate degree programs for incarcerated students. It was one of the fullest, freest discussions I had ever led. At the end, I realized why: The students weren’t afraid to give offense.

I’m not the only teacher to notice that, either. According to a Bard College professor quoted in Daniel Karpowitz’s book College in Prison, students on the college’s main campus, in New York, often pull their punches when a given topic of discussion makes them feel “uncomfortable.” But her students in prison don’t hold back. Having borne witness to real violence, they know — better than any of us — the difference between actions and words.

That’s precisely the distinction that gets lost in the fear-mongering culture of safe spaces, which teaches us to regard language itself as a minefield of danger and harm. And it paves the way for anyone to claim that a given word or idea makes them feel unsafe, and must therefore be tabooed or removed.

So in 2014, legislators in South Carolina threatened to cut funding for state universities that assigned summer reading about gay-related themes. An institution of higher education, the lawmakers said, “has to be reasonable and sensible to the feelings and beliefs of their students.”

No, it doesn’t. In fact, its foremost purpose is to challenge those feelings and beliefs at every turn. That won’t be easy, and it definitely won’t be comfortable. Advocates of safe spaces often invoke free expression, promising to give people the protection that they need to speak their minds. But the safe-space doctrine actually creates huge barriers to dialogue, by declaring any discomfort as out of bounds. And that makes the university unsafe for all of us.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-author of The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2017).