A Safe Space for Unsafe Spaces Restoring free speech to campus will take resolve, but Chicago shows the way. By L. Gordon Crovitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-safe-space-for-unsafe-spaces-1474235375
A University of Chicago letter welcoming freshmen with the warning they would arrive at a campus committed to “freedom of inquiry and expression” prompted a national debate on restoring free speech on campuses. The most interesting lesson is why it will be so hard for other universities to follow Chicago’s lead.
The letter rejected today’s higher-education fads: “We do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” Rigorous but civilized debate “may challenge you and even cause discomfort.”
A few university heads tried to defend their safe spaces and trigger warnings. The president of Wesleyan dismissed the Chicago letter as a publicity stunt. Northwestern’s president wrote that his students need “spaces where members of each [racial or other identity] group feel safe.”
But now that liberal administrators and professors are increasingly becoming targets of political correctness, many would like to restore free speech. Brown University was widely mocked last year for setting up a safe space for students “with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.” This year Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, declared in her convocation address: “Suppressing ideas at a university is akin to turning off the power at a factory.”
Liberal professors are terrified they will be set upon for an inadvertent offense, as happened last year at Yale when a professor was forced out for suggesting students could pick their own Halloween costumes without instructions from the administration. Recent surveys find most university students resent having to censor themselves out of fear of offending someone else’s beliefs.
Yet restoring free speech is easier said than done. Along with the letter, the incoming Chicago students got a book titled “Academic Freedom and the Modern University.” It recounts in detail the history of freewheeling debate at Chicago since its founding in the 1890s.
One factor that sets Chicago apart from other campuses is that it can rely only on serious academics for its reputation. President Robert Hutchins abolished the football team in 1939—despite many Big 10 championships—in order to focus on the life of the mind. Hutchins justified having communists speak on campus by arguing the way to rebut objectionable ideas “lies through open discussion rather than through prohibition.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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