(Washington Stand) A recent trend on college campuses is to install “safe spaces,” places where students — or certain identity-group subsets of students — can go to feel safe. These safe spaces are exclusionary by design; they protect students by insulating them. In extreme cases, safe spaces have been deemed to cover entire campuses, leading to the exclusion or disinvitation of undesirable visitors.
This “safe space” trend has been rightly ridiculed for its tendency to protect college students’ feelings from exposure to opposing viewpoints. Such exposure serves to sharpen the mind and used to be college’s main virtue. Thus, protecting students from “harm” by sequestering them from intellectual diversity undermines the whole point of college education.
But the silly “safe space” trend adopted the language of harm and safety because those are important considerations. Sticking with the collegiate context, students can’t devote themselves to their studies if they take their life in their hands every time they walk across campus. Fertilizing their mental acreage is orders of magnitude more difficult when outside sounds like a warzone, or a rock concert, or both at the same time. (Read More)
