Indeed!
Nevertheless, UC’s stance, according to Ellison’s letter, is that they do not support, encourage, or require trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. They also do not prohibit them.
8-| Yeah ok, technically you could call those safe spaces too, but let’s be honest here, there arepractical differences between a club/organization and a “safe space”. A “safe space” implies somewhere healthy/normal people go to avoid hearing differing opinions/viewpoints because those opinions/viewpoints are inconvenient and/or uncomfortable. A place like AA, on the other hand, is somewhere people go when they have a real problem with drinking and need help.
There is certainly some grey area here, but I think most rational people would understand that there are practical differences between a modern day “safe space” and a traditional club/organization.
I have no problem with reasonable warning for particularly graphic material. I’ve given such warnings myself, although in the form of a “heads up” during class, rather than a note on the syllabus.
My issue is that some students asking for trigger warnings seems to follow a much more expansive definition, one that goes well below any kind of reasonable person standard. When you are asking college professors to warn you for content that isn’t more graphic than what you would find on the ten o’clock news, we have a problem. “Hey, this novel includes a lengthy scene of sexual violence” is a lot different than trigger warnings for books that simply mention things like rape and suicide, let alone trigger warnings for things like homophobia, racism, ableism, cancer, alcoholism, etc.
I think what bothers me the most about the hostility currently being amped up towards trigger warnings and safe spaces is it is further marginalizing already marginalized minority groups rather than opening a real dialog.
“We don’t tolerate that here” mentality seeks to shut down and oppress rather than understand and discourse.
I like the writers point about the real problems being faced and tackled by the students at U Chicago and the university’s unwillingness to address it.
The old saying “the best defense is an offense” comes to mind here- the school is trying to negate the student’s real concerns by portraying them in an unflattering disparaging light … I think this is called a red herring. To me, its a shame the administration of U Chicago felt the need to stoop so low.
I for one am very impressed these kids are standing up for higher wages for low income workers, responsible investing, an end to police profiling and excessive use of force, sexual assault prevention and the myriad of other civic engagement endeavors the students have been engaged in on the U Chicago campus.
Note that the University of Chicago itself was politically active in defending racially restrictive real estate covenants, conditions, and restrictions, and otherwise trying to maintain neighborhoods as “safe spaces” for white people who did not want any black people living near them.
http://southside.uchicago.edu/History/Housing.html
It was also in the early 1960s that some University of Chicago owned apartment buildings were found to be refusing black renters, presumably to create “safe spaces” for white people who did not want black people living near them.
http://thecore.uchicago.edu/Summer2012/features/paper-trail.shtml
"The comments seemed overwhelmingly against her position with one person suggesting that if she couldn’t get NY times readers to see her point, she should reconsider her position because these readers were probably the most thoughtful and sympathetic audience she might find?
Is that really true?"
NYTimes readers are probably the among most thoughtful and sympathetic audience within the older generations. Its readership is heavily baby boomers and older, along with some Xers like me. Attitudes on this subject vary a lot by generation.
“Safe space” doesn’t imply anything. That’s your reading of it. Certainly some people appear to argue for the expansive view, but others ask for the narrow one. It’s important to distinguish what people mean when they say “safe space,” rather than simply decide they all mean one thing.
@Demosthenes49 agree, and that was one of the biggest problem with the Dean’s letter- he didn’t define what he meant by safe spaces or trigger warnings.
I like the faculty response to his letter as published in the school newspaper https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2016/9/13/letter-faculty-respond-ellison-letter/
“Those of us who have signed this letter have a variety of opinions about requests for trigger warnings and safe spaces. We may also disagree as to whether free speech is ever legitimately interrupted by concrete pressures of the political. That is as it should be. But let there be no mistake: such requests often touch on substantive, ongoing issues of bias, intolerance, and trauma that affect our intellectual exchanges. To start a conversation by declaring that such requests are not worth making is an affront to the basic principles of liberal education and participatory democracy.”
“The history of “safe spaces” goes back to gay, civil rights, and feminist efforts of the mid–20th century to create places protected from quite real forces of violence and intimidation. They also served as incubators of new ideas away from the censure of the very authorities threatened by these movements. It would be naïve to think that the University of Chicago is immune from social problems. Yet the administration confusingly disconnects “safe spaces” it supports (see the list of mentoring services on the College’s own website) from “intellectual safe spaces” that it does not, as if issues of power and vulnerability stop at the classroom door.”
and my favorite
“The right to speak up and to make demands is at the very heart of academic freedom and freedom of expression generally. We deplore any atmosphere of harassment and threat. For just that reason, we encourage the Class of 2020 to speak up loudly and fearlessly.”
From the NY Times article:
Every one of these things cost money, even though they are all laudable goals. It is easy for students to protest for things that cost more, given that they are not paying for it.
Yeah, see, that’s not at all what “safe space” means.
I totally support the concept of spaces where like minded people may gather without having to fear whatever from others. But the world is not a safe space, nor should it be. Likewise, an academic institution is by its very nature a space where an individual should confront ideas and concepts that are challenging. You might reject them. You might challenge them. You might accept them. You might take refuge in a safe space as you process them. But avoiding them - or worse, banishing them completely - is much more dangerous.
Except as we are finding out in NC (thanks to the NBA and the NCAA!) real world safe spaces do exist … you don’t actually have to live or exist in a world where ideas are at odds with the well being of others all the time. Business doesn’t thrive in that kind of environment.
Corporations and large organizations are starting to speak up saying we won’t stand for speech and actions that pit people as lessor than others… try spewing oppressive discriminatory speech at work and see how far it gets you…
There’s no danger of this, and nobody is really asking for it–students are making safe spaces within their larger campus communities.
I want to thank everyone for jumping back into this issue, because it gives me an opportunity to mangle one of my favorite obscure quotes, first relayed to me by a mentor after a terribly frustrating cross examination - “when howlers howl with fruitless pain, to wound immortals, or slay the slain”. Had he not been a Harvard guy he probably would have said to stop beating a dead horse, but it sounds much cooler in his formulation. I have stolen it myself over the years.
From the NYT opinion piece: “The implication was that students who support trigger warnings and safe spaces are narrow-minded, oversensitive and opposed to dialogue.”
There is no implication, there are many recorded instances of students in colleges/universities around the country who ARE narrow-minded, oversensitive and opposed to dialogue that have sparked these debates in the first place. I have no objections to trigger-warnings and safe spaces in and of themselves, but when the students involved take it to the level where they are pressuring administrators to uninvite speakers whose views are different from their own, when they demand to abolish English classes that feature white male poets, when minority groups want dorms/floors of their own to the exclusion of others (can you imagine if this were white males demanding this?), when Halloween costumes are banned if someone is uncomfortable, then there is a problem on college campuses.
Most students entering college are still heavily influenced by what their parents believe. College students should be able to have the maturity to be exposed to a variety of facts/opinions and come to their own conclusions about their personal beliefs. And this can’t be done if the PC folks are censoring unpopular views.
As noted above, the University of Chicago was complicit in the past for doing just that in supporting and practicing racially exclusionary housing policies, presumably because of a perceived need for white only “safe spaces”.
Also, it does not take much imagination to see that today, some people want to stop immigration, presumably because they want to make America white again, presumably because they believe that too many minorities mean that it is not a “safe space” for white people.
True, though not always in a direct manner as one may assume.
For instance, many college classmates were “influenced” in a sense they found the bigoted and/or social/religious conservative attitudes/norms prevalent in their parents and hometowns such that they wanted to attend a college which was as completely opposite of that as possible.
One example is a classmate from rural South Carolina who wanted to get away from growing up in an area overwhelmingly dominated by religious fundamentalism, conservative social/political attitudes, etc. .
Another is one of my Mississippi cousins who ended up being sent to a NE boarding school after a wasted year in a local private school with exceedingly low academic standards, attended college in a mid-Atlantic city, and has stayed there afterwards. From our conversations, I don’t think he’s eager to go back…especially considering he strongly rejects the prevailing social/religious norms of his rural Mississippi area.
This went doubly so for students who identified GBLTQ and found their hometowns and even parents/families to be hostile/bigoted towards them merely for having the sexual orientation they had.
And this continued after college as the vast majority ended up never coming back to their hometowns after graduation preferring to move to urban areas in the NE/Mid-Atlantic or the West Coast.
@Ohiodad51, thanks for the links.
This was not a free speech issue. I don’t see the government anywhere stopping speech.
Pretty large group of students in the video. Smart. Pretty well behaved too.
I said from the beginning the professor wasn’t listening. I said he had a responsibility to the students which he acknowledged. I can’t believe the professor invited somebody from FIRE. That is so off.
I wonder what happened that Sunday.
The professor might be a nice guy. I have no idea. People have different skill sets. He had the wrong job.
Watching the first video, it reminded me of when I attended my nephew’s graduation at Yale a few years ago.
Many of the graduates had no jobs, and no concrete job prospects at the time. Yet the kids did not seem to have a care in the world. It seemed to me that they were very disconnected from the real world, and the kids in this video give me the same impression.