On Saturday night I attended a house party where a Wesleyan student was asked to leave by two fellow students at the party. This student holds politically controversial opinions and is known for being vocal about them on campus, and presumably was asked to leave because his presence was personally offensive to these students. This incident brings up a lot of questions for me about safe spaces and tolerance, personal rights and community diversity. Wesleyan is an institution that prides itself on diversity, but as a campus community, we are often reminded of ways in which we feel the need to distance ourselves from certain kinds of difference. Sometimes this is out of a need for creating spaces in which to feel secure, other times in order to be surrounded by like-minded people who share our own values and ideals. I don’t feel comfortable defining the boundaries of another person’s safe space, but I think that we each need to consider for ourselves how much we actually value diversity, including political diversity, at this school, and what that means. Do tolerance and diversity require sharing spaces with people whose ideas we find offensive? And if these are things that you do value, how far are you willing to extend them?
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Political intolerance in a social sphere
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