Safe Spaces, Safe Classrooms

In a recent New York Times op-ed about the rise of safe spaces on college campuses, Judy Shulevitz writes, “[O]nce you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that the rest should be made safer.”  This then leads to the trend that “students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of…mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like.” Instead of providing a safety net, this battalion preemptively cocoons undergraduates in feel-good bubble-wrap, leading to what Shulevitz calls students’ “self-infantilization” and the weakening of their ability to handle intellectual debate compared to the “hardier souls” of generations past.
Shulevitz raises a worthwhile point about how safe spaces and intellectual debate can conflict with and restrict each other, particularly in college. However, by couching the safe-space advocacy movement in patronizing terms such as “hypersensitive”, “loath to…hurt someone’s feelings”, and “puerile”, Shulevitz’s article steeps itself in the sort of Millennial-bashing, toughen-up attitude that is ultimately unproductive. It focuses on the right to hurt and offend when discussing controversial topics, when the issue is one of responsibility—not only the academic responsibility to engage with viewpoints and people that challenge you, but also the social responsibility to create spaces where people don’t censor themselves out of fear. Balancing vibrant intellectual debate with the college community’s need for safe spaces has become a prominent university issue in recent years. However, Shulevitz rushes to assign blame rather than to ask how this perceived tug-of-war between freedom of speech and freedom from harassment arose in the first place.
Much of the conflict comes from Shulevitz’s separating the intellectual and social spheres of college. Shulevitz sees the harassment-free nature of safe spaces as therapeutic, and thus incompatible with the boundary-pushing nature of academia. Take one of the article’s central examples: Columbia University junior Adam Shapiro was asked by the student group Everyone Allied Against Homophobia to hang up a window flier in his room reading “I want this space to be a safe space.” In response, he hung up his own flier calling his room a dangerous space, on the grounds that “kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into the truth.” To both Shulevitz and Shapiro, the focus on creating safe spaces for college students allows to them to hide from “scary ideas” and miss out on having their ideas challenged and confronted, thus inhibiting their understanding of the outside world.
Yet it seems bizarre to draw this line in the sand, to polarize this issue by characterizing intellectual spaces as inherently unsafe or dangerous. Yes, college should be a place to have your opinions challenged and students should learn to deal with worldviews that clash with their own––but this sort of intellectual engagement doesn’t require a rejection of safe spaces altogether. The academic and social spheres of college are not separate. Most people who have ever spent time at a university would agree that such a division is impossible. The college experience is laden with overlap between the two: conversations during section that spill over into d-hall dinners, clubs such as Divest Harvard and HPR which intersect with topics discussed in class, the people who will stay up and have dawn-breaking, mind-blowing conversations with you. Shulevitz and Shapiro talk about “the safe space mentality infiltrating classrooms” as if the two were meant to be separate. In fact, much of student intellectual growth happens in spaces that aren’t inherently academic, where the classroom is our community and we feel confident engaging with academic topics on a personal level.
This common ground between intellectual and safe spaces is something that universities could better emphasize. Harvard, for example, included a program called Community Conversations during the 2014 Opening Days. The program is designed to help incoming freshmen engage in conversations about their diverse and complex identities, in order to “develop a sense of shared responsibility for upholding a compassionate and respectful community.” Yet if the assumption is that many students come into Harvard without a proper background on why safe spaces exist, it seems unlikely that a few mandatory sessions with several new entryway-mates will instill awareness of their everyday importance.
The Crimson’s recent articles on this subject are just one indicator of how relevant Shulevitz’s argument is to college students. That safe spaces are anti-intellectual and intellectual spaces are “dangerous” is a common belief, particularly on Harvard’s campus. However, in real life, academic discourse and safe spaces closely intertwine. Shulevitz wants to talk about the right to free speech––but a better conversation would be about our responsibility to treat safe spaces not as a shield or censor, but as an integral part of the classroom.