I actually agree that EC shouldn’t have sent the letter, in that even if you thought the original e-mail was slightly eye-roll worthy - as I might well have, had it been sent to me – a request for more care in choosing costumes seems to me tame enough not to require a lengthy dissent, no matter how thoughtful. I think the fact that EC responded with that e-mail is suggestive of an agenda (one I happen to agree with in general, by the way), and that a student who might well not have objected to EC expressing this opinion in a spontaneous discussion might nonetheless be legitimately annoyed that she was prioritizing her opposition to what is at worst slightly overblown but well-intentioned paternalism over concern for student feelings to the extent of framing a response in her capacity as dean.
However, it is absurd to call her letter racist, and I do feel comfortable criticizing students for a wildly disproportionate response. Who am I to say? Well, who is anybody to say anything, after all? As a reasonable, intelligent person capable of weighing two sides of an argument, the best I can do is listen and then call it like I see it. The fact that a student of color might have more invested in this dispute does not automatically make his or her opinion more valid than mine, or than EC’s. By no conventional definition of the word is Erica Christiakis’s nuanced expression of her personal opinion on the pertinent issue of how to respond to potentially offensive content “racist” behavior. At the very worst, it might be racially insensitive, although I don’t think it is that either.
But beyond this endless rehashing of the Yale incident, I do think a problem we’re seeing in this thread and in the response to the Chicago letter more generally is disagreement over what constitutes a “safe space.” I don’t actually think most people on the Christiakis/Chicago side of the debate would object to the notion that individual groups within a university might create their own parameters for discourse, whether or not we formally call that a “safe space.” The most obvious example of this is a support group – I don’t think you’d find many people who would say that someone should be allowed to come to a rape survivor’s support group and start discussing their opinion that that men were being railroaded by college tribunals, no matter how nuanced their position on the matter was. Even in the case of cultural or religious affinity groups, it seems to me uncontroversial that certain shared assumptions wouldn’t and shouldn’t have to be up for debate.
But student activists are being, I think, disingenuous in claiming that’s all they mean by “safe space.” A dorm or residential community, for instance, is not a “safe space” in the way that Yale students seem to be asking for. Certainly, you shouldn’t face violence or physical or emotional harassment in a dorm. If you tell a roommate or another peer that you don’t want to talk about a particular subject, he or she should be expected to respect that. But given that a dorm will contain a variety of students from a variety of backgrounds, it is not reasonable to expect not to be confronted, in that space, with ideas that might even be deeply offensive.
“You only got into this college because you are black” is a racist and inappropriate comment. “I don’t agree with affirmative action,” in the context of a discussion about racial preferences in admissions, might be a legitimately upsetting statement, to a minority student, but it is fair game, even if it happens over the dinner table and not in a classroom.
Certain (although not all) of the student protests over speakers also seem to assume that the campus as a whole should be a “safe space,” or at least a space where quite a few ideas that lie well within the mainstream of contemporary discourse shouldn’t be discussed.
