What ‘Safe Spaces’ Really Look Like on College Campuses

Jaime Kedrowski/Missourian via AP

Few concepts in academe have been dissected, debated, mocked, and defended in recent months as much as the “safe space.”

The term has cropped up repeatedly in campus protests, and as the discussion has become more polarized, the safe space has become a political football — social-media grist that offers each side a chance to see what it wants to see.

Observers inside and outside academe often seem to talk past one another: Either safe spaces are essential sanctuaries for members of historically marginalized groups, or they reflect a troubling desire to escape the rigorous intellectual inquiry that college should be all about.

Devoid of context, a meltdown over insensitive Halloween costumes at Yale University or the creation of a room with Play-Doh and coloring books for sexual-assault victims at Brown University can seem silly. And the broader trend those episodes seem to point to can appear problematic: college campuses filled with overly sensitive students who find course assignments and dissenting viewpoints traumatizing.

The latest national slugfest over safe spaces emerged after John Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, warned incoming students that the institution would not condone “the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” Some welcomed his opening salvo; others complained that it distorted what activists were trying to accomplish.

Mr. Ellison’s letter once again left many scratching their heads about what a safe space even means: Is it a physical place? An intellectual state of mind? Or both? Has the free-speech-vs.-safe-space debate been blown out of proportion?

Some supporters of safe spaces fear that the public debate has become a distraction. “I worry that the term has taken on such a negative connotation that it might deter universities from creating safe spaces for people who need them the most,” says Liz High, a senior at Appalachian State University and an intern at Campus Pride, a national group that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students.

“This isn’t about me leaving the room to crawl into a little space and cry about my hurt feelings,” she says. “It’s about creating an atmosphere where we can express opinions freely without being harassed or judged.”

Campus Roots

The term “safe space” can be traced back decades, though it’s not clear exactly when it was first used. Vaughan Bell, a neuroscientist and lecturer at University College London, wrote a blog post last fall suggesting that safe spaces initially cropped up in the late 1940s, as sensitivity training gained traction in corporate America.

Several scholars say the term was commonly used in activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The LGBT community considered safe spaces to be physical locations — for instance, gay and lesbian bars — where sexual minorities could be themselves without fear of discrimination or prosecution under anti-sodomy laws. The women’s-rights movement also sought to carve out safe spaces — both physical and intellectual — where feminists could gather free from the influence of what they deemed patriarchal thought.

Mention of safe spaces first appeared in research literature in the mid-1990s, in the context of “safe zone” programs through which faculty members could learn how to support the LGBT community, says Donna Braquet, an associate professor and biology librarian at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and former director of the campus’s Pride Center. The workshops are popular today on many campuses, where rainbow-colored stickers emblazoned with phrases like “safe space” adorn the office doors of employees who complete the programs.

While campus centers for women, LGBT students, and racial-minority students weren’t specifically called safe spaces at first, Ms. Braquet says, “the idea of safety was wrapped up in those places.”

Students today often use the term “safe space” to describe such centers. Stephanie Greene, a senior at the University of Chicago, says the campus’s Center for Identity and Inclusion “self-identifies as a safe space.” There she can seek help from supportive staff members and find community among other black students.

Activists have also embraced the importance of safe spaces for sexual-assault victims, says Mahroh Jahangiri, executive director of Know Your IX, a network of victims and advocates whose name refers to the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX. Carving out concrete areas on campuses, she says, allows them to work through their trauma in supportive environments on their own time, increasing the odds that they’ll graduate.

In many of those cases, a “safe space” means a physical place. But the term can also refer to intellectual safety. In the early and mid-2000s, Ms. Braquet recalls, it was used to describe efforts to make students in underrepresented groups comfortable participating in classroom discussions.

Anne McClintock, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Princeton University, says that when she was a graduate student at Columbia University, in the 1980s, the Barnard Center for Research on Women across the street served as both a physical and an intellectual safe space. “Challenging issues like pornography, rape, racism, sex work, and queer sexualities — typically taboo at Columbia — were openly discussed in messy, complicated, and exhilarating ways,” Ms. McClintock wrote in an email.

It’s that intellectual component of safe spaces that often draws the most public reproach. But it hasn’t always been a campus hot button. Debate over safe spaces seems to be mostly limited to a few elite institutions like the University of Chicago, Ms. Greene says, but even there, “it hasn’t really been that contentious in the past.”

Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, hasn’t seen much demand for safe spaces on his campus, in Florida. “I talk to students about safe spaces and trigger warnings, and 90 to 95 percent of them think the whole thing is ridiculous,” says Mr. Ferguson. “They don’t feel like they need to be sheltered.”

Safe-space discourse becomes problematic, he says, “when professors are expected to start censoring what we say because it might be upsetting to someone.” That happens rarely, he says, and no more today than when he started teaching, 20 years ago.

A Year of Controversy

Sometimes, though, it seems as if the safe space is all people talk about. That was the case last September at Wesleyan University after a group of students, alumni, and staff members petitioned to defund the Connecticut campus’s newspaper, The Argus, for publishing an opinion essay that criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. The newspaper, the critics wrote, “neglects to provide a safe space for the voices of students of color.”

The newspaper responded with a front-page apology. That set off free-speech alarms in some quarters and prompted Wesleyan’s president, Michael S. Roth, to publish a blog post in which he encouraged students who were angry not to shut off debate or “demand ideological conformity.”

Despite that controversy, Mr. Roth says, he has never heard a student at Wesleyan ask for an intellectual safe space. “The idea that a safe space is a corridor for intellectual isolationism is a fantasy,” he says.

“What is being served by the nostalgia about the good old days when gay people and people of color were systematically marginalized?” Mr. Roth asks. He says he’s puzzled about the national furor over students’ supposedly thin skins. “Why are people so freaked out about this?”

Mr. Roth says a new student whose gender and ethnicity weren’t immediately clear recently approached him and thanked him for defending safe spaces. “This person has a lot of risks going on and simply wants places like us white guys have always had, where they can kick back and not feel the need to defend or explain themselves.”

Religious groups, fraternities, and sororities have long been places where students from similar backgrounds congregate, safe-space supporters point out. They are rarely criticized for encouraging self-segregating, as programs for minority or other underrepresented students frequently are.

A few months after the Wesleyan controversy, further tension about safe spaces and free speech erupted. This time, it was at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where students protesting the campus’s racial climate tried to ban reporters from their tent encampment as they celebrated the announcement that their activism had succeeded in ousting the president and chancellor.

Turmoil at Mizzou

Last fall student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri at Columbia. Now Mizzou’s leaders are striving to meet students’ demands while restoring stability and the public’s faith in their institution.

• Mizzou Incident Rekindles Anger Over Treatment of Black Students
• What It Will Take for Missouri to Meet Its Faculty-Diversity Goal
• At the U. of Missouri, Searching for President Everything

Protesting under the name Concerned Student 1950, the students declared their encampment, in the middle of the main quad, a “safe space” that was off limits to reporters. The protesters’ rationale — that they needed a space to protect themselves from the “insincere narratives” of a predominantly white news media — was a new and, to some, troubling twist on the concept of safe spaces. The controversy was inflamed when a Missouri faculty member, Melissa A. Click, tried to evict a student journalist who was attempting to film the encampment.

At Claremont McKenna College, in California, student activists last fall demanded a safe space in the form of “a resource center for students of color.” The final proposal for the resource center, drawn up this past spring by the college’s steering committee on diversity and inclusion, calls the center a “space for expression, study, dialogue, and exploration of our intersecting social identities,” but does not include any references to “marginalized students,” which the activists had considered a priority.

Hiram E. Chodosh, Claremont McKenna’s president, and Peter Uvin, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, sent a message last week to the campus in response to the University of Chicago letter. The officials noted that the college’s faculty and Board of Trustees had endorsed Chicago’s free-speech principles, as a number of other institutions have done.

“We teach sensitive material. We do not mandate trigger warnings. We invite controversial speakers,” they wrote. The new resource center, they continued, “is equally resolute in its commitment to inclusivity, openness, and pluralism.”

‘Every Story Has Its Context’

How has the debate over safe spaces reached such a fever pitch? Conservative scholars who feel that their views are being stifled are among the harshest critics of safe spaces and trigger warnings, says Kevin M. Gannon, a professor of history and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University, in Iowa.

One incident many critics seized upon was a series of chalked messages supporting Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, that appeared at Emory University and dozens of other colleges this past spring.

One student told The Emory Wheel, a student newspaper, that the messages had made her feel unsafe. Others suggested that Emory officials should investigate and punish those responsible because Mr. Trump’s name had become synonymous with racism.

It seemed that some students wanted to censor views they didn’t like, says Alexander (Sasha) Volokh, an associate professor of law at Emory. “That is a restriction on speech,” says Mr. Volokh, who is the incoming chair of Emory’s committee on open expression.

“I don’t have any huge problem with the concept of safe spaces as long as we’re constantly out there insisting that people not use terms like ‘unsafe’ when they’re faced with political, intellectual, or social disagreements,” he says.

Still, “every story has its context,” says Mr. Gannon. “What might look like a silly bunch of self-entitled brats might be part of a broader context we aren’t aware of.”

It was easy to ridicule the Emory students, he says, but the chalkings might have been the final straw for black students who were upset about feeling unsupported on the campus. Critics of safe spaces sometimes take a seemingly ridiculous example of political correctness and “wield it like a club to beat the other side over the head with,” he says.

‘Not a Day Care’

One college president — Everett Piper, of Oklahoma Wesleyan University — seized on what some would see as an extreme example of hypersensitivity. After a student complained that a sermon on love had made him feel victimized because the student himself didn’t show enough love, Mr. Piper wrote a strongly worded blog post. “This is not a day care. It’s a university,” Mr. Piper wrote. The Christian university, he added, “is not a ‘safe space,’ but a place to learn.”

Mr. Piper says that the response to his post was overwhelmingly positive. “Even people who disagree with my worldview affirmed the need for this kind of message,” he says.

Others argue that older academics who complain about coddled millennials probably attended colleges that, in their day, were less ethnically and sociologically diverse. As the range of student experiences has broadened, so have the strategies needed to promote learning, says Mr. Gannon.

Still, given how polarized the debate over safe spaces has become, some have suggested moving away from the phrase altogether. “The term has become so loaded, and has so much politics around it, that it almost detracts from what we’re trying to do,” says Anthony Martin Gacita, a student at Northwestern University’s medical school. He is involved in the medical school’s “safe-space training program,” which helps faculty members make their classrooms more supportive of LGBT students.

Teresa Mastin, the school’s director of diversity and inclusion, refers to “brave spaces” where difficult discussions take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect. “When students don’t feel comfortable in a space where they’re supposed to be learning, that’s a problem,” she says.

Ms. Jahangiri, of Know Your IX, prefers to try to create “safer spaces.” Violence against women and other students can occur even on campuses that seem friendly, she says. “There are no safe spaces on American college campuses.”

Meanwhile, college presidents across the country are continuing to weigh in with their own spins on the advice given to students at Chicago. Clayton S. Rose, president of Bowdoin College, in Maine, used his blog to urge new students to be “intellectually fearless.”

When you’re in class, the dining hall, or the dorm, “and you hear something that really pushes your buttons, that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, you should run to it, embrace it, figure out why you are uncomfortable, unsettled, offended, and then engage with it,” he said. Then he added a plea: “Engage with it in a thoughtful, objective, and respectful way.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.