The widely noted University of Chicago letter to freshman
is, I’m afraid – with due respect to my friends there – basically quite stupid (in
the words that have attracted the most attention). The phrasings are either
transparently false or so vague as to obstruct rather than facilitate clear
thinking about the issues the letter purports to address.
Quoting: “We do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe’
spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with
their own.” That’s either false or an indication that people should think carefully
about sending their children to the University. Consider some examples: A war
veteran is assigned a dormitory room with a roommate who is aggressively
anti-the-war-in-which-the veteran-served. Almost every evening the roommate
seeks to engage the veteran in a conversation about the injustice of the war and
of specific incidents during it. The veteran goes to the appropriate university
authorities and asks to be assigned a different roommate, saying, “I’m
perfectly happy to engage in a discussion of the war in a military history class,
a philosophy class on justice in wartime, and in many other places. But in the
evening I just want to kick back and relax, and study for my classes. My room,
in short, should be a safe space with respect to conversations about the war.”
I think the university might well be irresponsible if its only response were, “Grown-ups
have to learn how to work out for themselves the resolution of these kinds of
disputes.” (That’s the “think carefully about sending your kids to the
University” prong.) And, in my view, it wouldn’t be acting badly if it
reassigned either the veteran or the roommate to another dormitory room,
thereby "condon[ing] the creation of [an] intellectual 'safe space'" for the veteran. (That’s the “it’s false” prong.)
Or consider variations on the widely known case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the
outcome of which conservatives have vigorously criticized. One way of putting
the claim by CLS in that case is that the members of the organization were
entitled by the Constitution to have a safe space within which they could
explore those aspects of Christianity that they chose to explore. Again, they might
well be willing to discuss evidence for miracles and other features of
Christian belief in other venues, such as classes in the history of religion,
but they want somewhere that they can explore the questions they find most
pressing. Allowing non-Christians into the association makes that difficult. A
variation would be an association of Jewish students who wanted to exclude from
their meetings neo-Nazis who wanted to discuss the “evidence” presented in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These, and similar cases that are readily
imaginable, show that universities can, and sometimes should, “condone the
creation of intellectual safe spaces” of the sort the letter describes.
To the extent that there’s something coherent underlying
this aspect of the letter, it is that the university does not condone the
creation of safe spaces in certain venues. But then all the interesting work
lies in identifying the venues. As far as I can tell, there are several
candidates. The first and most obvious is the classroom. Even there, though,
sometimes the university should condone the creation of a space in which there
is a sharp restriction on “ideas and perspectives different from” the ones
being offered in the class. Consider a course described clearly in the
catalogue as a course dealing with Austrian economics, with a syllabus whose
readings focus tightly on that topic. Students who want to discuss Marxist
economics can, I think, properly be silenced in that class – perhaps as long as
there is some other university-based venue in which they can explore Marxist economics
– so that students only interested in Austrian economics can get on with their
studies of that topic. Again – a safe space for the study of Austrian
economics.
A second candidate for an appropriate venue in which there
are no safe spaces are the university’s common areas. Here – maybe – the Chicago
letter’s position might have some bite, in proscribing the creation of exclusive
“free speech zones” in university common spaces, thereby making other zones “safe
spaces.” I’m unsympathetic to the idea of exclusive free speech zones, but I
confess that I can’t get too excited about their creation as long as they aren’t
overly restrictive. For example, it’s not obvious to me that a university
should be criticized for excluding “free speech activities” (suitably defined)
from heavily trafficked areas when it has experience showing that such
activities in those areas impedes students’ ability to get to their regularly
scheduled classes on time (though a lot of work is hidden in the phrase “suitably
defined”).
A final candidate are the common areas on residential
dormitories. Here, I think, the question is the extent to which the roommate case
I opened with extends outside the physical space of the room itself. I take the
Chicago position to be that, whatever the resolution of the roommate case, the
corridors and other common spaces in residential dormitories will not be “safe
spaces.” To which my reaction is, “The letter is a rather exaggerated way of
saying that.”
So, I think, when the conservative-tinged politically-correct
overtones of the Chicago letter are put aside and its intellectual content
examined, there’s really not much there.
More later on “we do not support so-called ‘trigger
warnings,’” which, if taken seriously (which later “explanations” show it
should not be), is an interference with sometimes appropriate pedagogic choices
some instructors make.