Colleges should warn students: No ‘safe spaces’ here

As the new school year gets underway, most colleges and universities send one or more letters to their students, welcoming them to campus and (usually) offering some pablum about all the exciting opportunities and challenges in the year ahead.

A far more useful exercise would be to send out a letter like the following:

Dear New and Returning Students,

Welcome to a new academic year.

Given all the disruption that occurred on college campuses last year, I thought this would be a good occasion to state as clearly as possible what this college’s policy is with regard to socalled safe spaces.

Whether colleges should try to provide safe spaces for their students depends in part on what one means by that term. If you mean simply that colleges should do everything they can to make sure that their students are free from muggings, theft, and physical assault, then every college should be a safe space.

But most students who use that phrase mean something very different: that colleges should protect them from ideas or symbols they might find offensive or insulting. In this sense, the only place on campus that you have a right to consider a safe space is your own dorm room. If you wish — and please note that I’m not recommending this — you can set things up so that all the books in your room contain ideas you support or at least find nonthreatening, all the posters on your walls are pleasant and agreeable, and all the people who enter meet your exacting political standards. You can also rig your computer so it only accepts emails and goes to websites that you find congenial.

If you have one or more roommates, arranging all this may become a bit more challenging.

But once you set foot outside your room, you should have no expectation that the rest of the campus is a safe space. It’s not that we desire to offend. It’s just that any attempt to make the campus at large a safe space would totally undermine its principal purposes — teaching and research.

The list of topics that could not be discussed because somebody might be offended is long: affirmative action, immigration, terrorism, biological and neuroscientific research about the differences between men and women, crime and policing, family structure and its effect on children, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gay rights and welfare. Depending on who’s doing the teaching and how the issue is approached, no subject is safe.

At too many colleges today, students, faculty and visiting speakers can say anything they like in support of, say, affirmative action. But in all sorts of ways — some subtle, some very blatant — it’s made clear you’re not supposed to say anything that implies that affirmative action is a bad policy or unfair to white males.

Or: you can argue that men and women are biologically the same or that women are biologically superior. But as the then-president of Harvard learned a number of years ago, it’s definitely not safe to argue that men are better adapted for certain tasks than women are.

A place that permits only one side of an issue to be supported isn’t an educational institution — it’s a place of indoctrination. And it certainly won’t teach you anything about critical thinking.

So please understand: By enrolling in this college, you have agreed to be exposed to all sorts of ideas — some you agree with, some you disagree with, and many of which you may find offensive. If this wasn’t made explicit in our promotional brochures or when you signed your letter of acceptance, consider this letter your official notification.

If you strongly disagree with a particular speaker, there are lots of actions you may take. You can decide not to attend; you can try to convince other students that they shouldn’t attend; you can invite a speaker with a different point of view; you can write a pamphlet or an article in the campus newspaper explaining why the speaker’s views are wrong.

But you obstruct those who do want to attend or prevent other attendees from hearing the speaker. Your freedom of speech does not allow you to deny others that same freedom.

If you disagree with these policies, I would strongly recommend that you think about transferring to a different institution — a college that doesn’t value freedom of thought (there are lots of them) or an explicitly political organization that makes its values and prejudices clear from the start and has no pretenses about being open to all viewpoints.

But if you do stay — and if you take advantage of the opportunities offered here — there are few experiences in your life that can rival that of serious intellectual engagement. Sincerely,

The College President