Campuses Can't Become One Big 'Safe Space'
March 31, 2016 12:06 AM EST
By Megan McArdle
What’s happening on campus when students demand "safe spaces" where they won't be confronted with troubling ideas? Many people debating that talk about it in terms of restricting freedom of speech. But in a thoughtful lecture recently, Jacob Levy suggests that what’s really at stake is freedom of association -- the way that we come together to build communities of purpose.
If a professor gets up and rants at his mathematics class about Donald Trump for five hours every week, and gets fired, we would not say that the university had violated his free speech rights or his academic freedom. Why not? Indisputably, he has a legal right to say these things. Under most codes of academic freedom, he even has the right to say these things and maintain his employment. But he can be fired because a university is an association with a purpose -- extending human knowledge and passing that knowledge down to the students. And this math professor acted against that purpose.
“You can’t rant about politics instead of teaching math” is not the only way that the university community restricts speech. Levy points out that there’s also a limit on when and where we contest ideas between different sub-communities within the university. Physicists can make fun of social scientists for not doing “real science,” and the economists and the sociologists can call each other names, and philosophers can point out that everyone’s assumptions about reality are really pretty shaky, but at the end of the day, each of these faculties retreats to their offices to do their work. It’s not that these challenges aren’t valuable; they are, in fact, one of the great benefits of a multi-disciplinary university. But if they all had to continually justify their methods and assumptions to each other, no one would ever get any other work done. So universities create “safe spaces” (aka academic departments) where people can sit down and deploy their discipline’s methods without having to start each time with a defense of their work from first principles.
So, asks Levy, if we don’t mind “safe spaces” in departments, why do we freak out when students try to create other sorts of safe spaces? He looks at the example of a controversy at Yale a few months back. It’s a good question -- but I think that looking more closely at that controversy shows why Levy’s model doesn’t really work in that case.
An official associated with one residential college sent an e-mail to residents that criticized a Yale administration e-mail about offensive Halloween costumes. Is that really the same thing as following you into your dorm room and insisting that you spend nine hours debating affirmative action, or popping up at the meeting of the College Democrats to demand that they denounce socialism? The important part of the former two is that they’re nearly impossible to get away from. They’re disrupting the ability of other people to sit there and think about what they want to think about, rather than what the speaker wants.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-31/campuses-can-t-become-one-big-safe-space
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