NYTimes | The
safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might
find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The
room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh,
calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as
well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma
Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who
helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates
that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the
lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to
the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that
really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.
Safe
spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent
among college students, that their schools should keep them from being
“bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe
space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a
notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert
students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.
Some
people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising
groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of
the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of
like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or
what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual
bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say,
a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such
restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a
perfectly fine idea.
But
the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of
controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate
some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that
they should be made safer.
This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University
student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted
of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The
headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.”
The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows.
The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia
Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial
asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to
each other.”
A
junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer
space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had
that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone
won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an
interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy
for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a
great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating
classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say
anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can
have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.
