Attributing “safe spaces” to intellectual censorship is like attributing the American civil war to states rights. It’s propaganda. Michelle Alexander, in this year’s common reading, “The New Jim Crow,” opens our eyes to a social structure that disenfranchises and alienates our neighbors and family members from the American experience, a structure that has successfully done so under the protection of a bipartisan war on drugs. Academia’s war against safe spaces is not all that different from the so-called “War on Drugs,” as it is disguised under perhaps the most bipartisan philosophy of all time: freedom of speech.
The crusade against “safe spaces” has been led by those claiming to be protecting the breadth of intellectual discussion that is the college experience. From student coalitions at Princeton to a letter freshly penned to incoming freshman at the University of Chicago, “safe spaces” have been mislabeled as a kryptonite to free speech and the all-important exchange of ideas. But as someone who has freshly emerged from an orientation where I witnessed the fiery oration of an asexual peer and found the editors of the school newspaper looking for someone to write a sex column, I didn’t get the impression that ideas weren’t being exchanged or that ideas were being suppressed. Instead, I felt the tingle of a place that was ready to push the envelope and usher in the next era of intellectual discussion. I felt the aura of a quasi-utopian place that incorporates more speech, more discussion, more intellect, and more backgrounds than I have ever experienced.
The opposition’s argument is more than about defending free speech: it also paints a picture of younger generations as coddled and unprepared for the harsh realities of the world outside the campus bubble. And in all fairness, perhaps I am coddled. I never had to protest for my ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation to be admitted to a college, and my voter registration process was straightforward. I also don’t like being called a spick and am more than willing to tell you that.
Part of what makes the world beyond the campus so “harsh” is its failure to accept the speech and intellectual concepts we college students have come to embrace. When the gender unicorn handout was given to me during orientation, I saw it as the University community’s acceptance of who you are, not some push towards intellectual conformity. We are accepting cultures and people from intensely different backgrounds and promoting the exchange and diversification of ideas. The community of the University is a melting pot of ideas, and the sizzles and bubbles echo in the dorm halls from dawn to dusk. Perhaps the best part is that I do feel safe and welcomed. After all, who would want to be in an “unsafe place”?
As I was walking from my second class back to the Butterfield dorms, I found myself talking to a classmate of mine who told me that in his first class, his professor remarked that it was the most diverse class he had ever seen. One of the professor’s final comments was that people had died to make that so. It is an eerie feeling knowing that so many of the fundamental aspects of our community were not always a part of the American experience. But even eerier is to know that more of the fundamental aspects of the Wesleyan community still are not. Yet, the communities that we form on our college campuses in many ways are reflective of the communities we will go out in the world and create. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled, “Political Correctness and Its Real Enemies,” the author Jim Sleeper argues that “a college is a civil society on training wheels,” and that “if collegiate civil societies are lurching into ditches as often now as the ‘free speech’ campaign claims, that’s partly because the larger society is, too.” The responsibility of pulling society out of these ditches is one that we college students will inevitably bear. “Safe spaces,” then, are a necessity, as they allow college students to safely deal with complex, and important issues.
Many who read this may feel as if I have skirted around an issue. They may feel as if speech insulting specific people is being suppressed. I don’t feel that way, and I have seen enough Trump signs in dorm room windows to say that with conviction. However, I do think that President Roth was onto something in his response to the University of Chicago’s letter: “And there are some things, after all, that a university should refuse to legitimate or dignify by treating them as fit subjects for academic discussion. When we make a subject part of a debate, we legitimate it in ways that may harm individuals and the educational enterprise. We must beware of the rubric of protecting speech being used as a fig leaf for intimidating those with less power.” Let us at Wesleyan celebrate both the freedom of speech and thought as well as the freedom to be who you are.
Perez is a member of the class of 2020.