Michael Roth’s new book argues for ‘Safe Enough Spaces’ on college campuses
Wesleyan University President Michael Roth has observed university polemic from all sides — as student, teacher, administrator — giving him a lifetime of perspective on free speech, inclusion and what today are called “safe spaces.”
Roth has written a book titled “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses” (Yale University Press, 142 pp., $25). As the title reflects, Roth argues for a solution to on-campus tension between ideologically opposite students.
Roth graduated from Wesleyan in 1978. He later became a teacher there, and since 2007, he has been president. As a student, he was active in the antinuclear movement. As an educator and administrator, he has observed campus outrage over 21st century issues: Black Lives Matter, boycotts against Israel, freedom of the student press, etc.
Roth is fine with the idea of “safe spaces,” but as steward of one of the country’s most elite schools, he prefers the term “safe enough spaces.”
“A ‘safe enough space’ is a place where you know you’re not going to get attacked, where the professor if you are a woman, or a man, is not going to hit on you, etc. Those are basic protections that I think we give students so they can actually learn,” Roth says.
He uses the book to counter a pervasive complaint: that college students are pampered and polarized, unable to handle dissent, expecting their university to protect them from anything upsetting.
“A lot of the book is pushing back at the narrative that students today are spoiled or they’re closeminded, or that students today are less adventurous than students were a couple generations ago,” Roth, 62, says. “The myths about college students being overly zealous, closeminded social-justice warriors are just that, they’re myths … I hope to give a more nuanced portrait.”
In an interview in his office on the Middletown campus, Roth discussed the contemporary college dynamic, the value of encountering opposing viewpoints, on the left and the right: political correctness.
Q: The takeaway from the book is that political correctness is universally disliked and that the concept has been weaponized.
A: I don’t think you can find anybody who claims to be politically correct. Nobody wants to accept the label. … It’s a label that allows somebody else to avoid dealing with whatever the issue is. You say that person is racist, they say “oh you’re being politically correct.” Sexist, “you’re being politically correct.” You’re hogging all the pie, “you’re being politically correct.” It’s just a way of avoiding responsibility.
President Trump is the ace of this. In the early debate … Megyn Kelly cited all the things he’s said about women, and he just, “bah, you’re being politically correct.” He didn’t say “I didn’t say that” or “I didn’t mean that,” he just deflected the question in this way. …
Calling people politically correct has become a weapon to push a rightwing agenda. What it means is, I don’t want to deal with you.
Q: You use philosopher Richard Rorty’s definition of parochialism: “Self-protective knowingness about the present.” Is parochialism a stumbling block in communication among people of differing views?
A: Absolutely. I believe people enclose themselves in their little worlds, little siloes … and are self-protective, so you won’t have to deal with anybody who might challenge your worldview or teach you something new or let you realize that you’re wrong about something.
Q: If people have grown up with social media, which is quite parochial, do you believe that affects students’ thinking?
A: I do. We have to break those bubbles. Our job is to make sure we expose students to things they wouldn’t sign up for otherwise, ideas they don’t already agree with, ways of life they wouldn’t have encountered on their own so they can discover that even outside their comfort zones, or especially outside their comfort zones, there is extraordinary things that they can learn and that can
really enrich their lives.
Q: Do you think the age of Trump has altered what people are willing to say?
A: If anything President Trump has made idiotic public pronouncements routine, so people feel they can say anything because if the president of the United States can speak like a jerk, lots of people can say jerky things.
Q: Would that make students feel they are unsafe?
A: I don’t know if it makes them feel not safe. I think what changes the safety is the empowerment of ICE to come to college campuses and other places to arrest people who might be in the country without documentation. But that’s not about safe spaces. That’s about safety. …
I think that the Trump administration maybe has raised the stakes for students. … I think that the students realize, I hope they realize, that the stakes are very high right now and if they want to live in the kind of country that they want, they have to actually help build it and join political organizations and work together.
Q: Some people believe a person’s speech or actions have to threaten a person’s physical safety to be harassment. Do you agree with that?
A: No. It’s remarkable that some people when they talk about free speech, will deny the reality of psychological distress where in no other context would they ever deny that psychological illnesses or psychological distress was real. It’s for me mindboggling. … We need a moral and political definition of acceptable conversation and speech on campuses. It’s not just a legalistic determination.
Q: You use the phrase “Angry debate is better than no debate at all.” Could you expand on that?
A: When you’re in a classroom and nobody’s talking, it’s terrible stuff. If you’re at a dinner table and everybody’s looking at their phone instead of talking to each other, that’s terrible.
If people are talking or arguing, that’s fine. They’re engaging with one another. What we want in our classes is that kind of engagement. What teachers do all the time in colleges and universities is, they’ll take a point of view in a class, not because it’s their point of view, but because they know that will instigate a conversation among the students. They play devil’s advocate, or just come at something from a different point of view.
Colleges and universities are not any more a place to disseminate information. You can get all your information on the phone or on your computer. They are places to introduce students to different practices, different ways of life, different modes of thinking, and to do that in good company, good conversation and debate. But if you’re just passively receiving information, that’s a waste of time.