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Universities as Safe Spaces.
10 years ago
There's a lot of talk about universities lately. Discussions on if 'Trigger Warnings" should be a requirement for courses. Discussions of Micro Transgressions, what can and cannot be said in the classroom. There seems to be two sides of this, either universities are to be safe spaces, with new policies to ensure that students are emotionally protected, or academic freedom must reign, and policies limiting faculty hurt that.
Here's my own perspective as a recent student and as an adjunct professor. You can have both, but not entirely.
I do not believe, nor do I think it is wise for a university to entirely be a safe space. At it's core the goal of the academy is truth, and to gain truth you must delve into the most uncomfortable of subjects.
Academic freedom is a central tenet of universities and the academy. It's a belief that academics must be free to explore topics which are controversial without fear. For instance, if I can run an experiment that questions the foundations of evolution, or the nature of the big bang, I can do that without fear of the university firing me.
More specific to my work, I research sociopathy and it's connection to ethics without fear of the administration firing me because my research doesn't match current popular theories, etc.
To create policies limiting teaching material, or similar for reasons not related to truth or argument is against the point of a university. For instance, it was suggested that Harvard law professors stop teaching on subjects regarding rape law.
That is of course an extreme example, but illustrates an untenable position with the foundations of a university.
That being said, that doesn't mean no place on campus can be a safe space. A university is not just a place to house the academy, it is a place where human beings live and grow. A student should at the very least feel comfortable and safe from harm while attending school. There are absolutely methods to be enacted to make a student feel comfortable and safe while going to get food, while living in the dorm, even while sitting in the class. No one should ever feel they are being attacked.
I don't think the entirety of a college education can or should be comfortable. if a higher education does not challenge your ideas and thoughts then it is not preparing you, it is not creating a critical thinker. That doesn't mean we can't put in some ways to help students, just that the entire thing cannot be scrubbed clean.
Here is an example from my own work. I teach bioethics some semesters. By far it is my favorite subject but it is a subject rife with emotionally explosive concepts. Human experimentation, abortion, euthanasia. At the beginning of the semester I explain to students that there's some pretty rough material we'll cover. I give them an out, that if they feel too uncomfortable to take part they can leave class for the day and get attendance points for talking to me in my office.
I remind them again particularly before he abortion debate, because by it's nature not only do we deal with abortion but questions of rape as well. I've never had someone abuse my policy. in fact each time it's used and I talk to students I am so thankful that I had the forethought to mention it. I've had students in my office crying over past events and my heart hurts for what they went through.
Still, I cannot wipe the material from the class. To do so would be a disservice to the students, even if it makes them uncomfortable. I am well aware what I teach in bioethics is triggering, but to give less would not allow the students to fully understand the material. I cannot remove the discussion of rape from ethics without doing a disservice to students, but that doesn't mean students shouldn't be made aware to some extent.
Personally I feel the warnings are up to the professors and policies would do more harm than good. My bioethics cant be treated as a math class, or a chem class, English or whatever. They are each different with different needs and to make a policy about trigger warnings in syllabi I think would only serve to hurt students and professors.
So that is that, Universities as a whole cannot be entirely safe spaces free from concepts that are challenging, free from things that make one remember past trauma. In part because to do so would cut necessary material, but also because such a thing is entirely personal.
by and far I think a better option is understanding on both sides, The professor understanding some students can have bad reactions to things and being flexible, and the student understanding that they must sometimes deal with uncomfortable material, material that will remind them of traumatic events perhaps or make them question their deepest held beliefs.
Educating faculty on issues is important, but once we get nitpicky and demanding regarding what can and cannot be said or taught, it does more harm than good in my opinion.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think the people asking for safe spaces want to never be uncomfortable, but are asking for some material to be censored as it can be extremely inflammatory.
The problem is sometimes, particularly in ethics, inflammatory material must be discussed to come to better answers. I cannot remove rape discourse from my classroom. At different parts of the semester I'll discuss racism in human experiments or abuse of mentally ill individuals, and I will ask some dark questions about acting against the wishes of the mentally ill, or the morality of forcing someone to be forced to keep their pregnancy to term.
In normal conversation asking "Is it morally acceptable to value certain lives less" is completely inappropriate, but in my class it's necessary. It's horrific in normal conversation to say "look, because you have X physical disability, you life is not worth as much than this person without" but in the context of organ transplants, I challenge my students to consider those questions so that they can critically think about current policies and even possible solutions (seriously, organ transplants have a metric that weighs the values of peoples lives and disability is considered)
My class can't both function to have people understand the policies and implications and remove inflammatory unpleasant material.
Here's my own perspective as a recent student and as an adjunct professor. You can have both, but not entirely.
I do not believe, nor do I think it is wise for a university to entirely be a safe space. At it's core the goal of the academy is truth, and to gain truth you must delve into the most uncomfortable of subjects.
Academic freedom is a central tenet of universities and the academy. It's a belief that academics must be free to explore topics which are controversial without fear. For instance, if I can run an experiment that questions the foundations of evolution, or the nature of the big bang, I can do that without fear of the university firing me.
More specific to my work, I research sociopathy and it's connection to ethics without fear of the administration firing me because my research doesn't match current popular theories, etc.
To create policies limiting teaching material, or similar for reasons not related to truth or argument is against the point of a university. For instance, it was suggested that Harvard law professors stop teaching on subjects regarding rape law.
That is of course an extreme example, but illustrates an untenable position with the foundations of a university.
That being said, that doesn't mean no place on campus can be a safe space. A university is not just a place to house the academy, it is a place where human beings live and grow. A student should at the very least feel comfortable and safe from harm while attending school. There are absolutely methods to be enacted to make a student feel comfortable and safe while going to get food, while living in the dorm, even while sitting in the class. No one should ever feel they are being attacked.
I don't think the entirety of a college education can or should be comfortable. if a higher education does not challenge your ideas and thoughts then it is not preparing you, it is not creating a critical thinker. That doesn't mean we can't put in some ways to help students, just that the entire thing cannot be scrubbed clean.
Here is an example from my own work. I teach bioethics some semesters. By far it is my favorite subject but it is a subject rife with emotionally explosive concepts. Human experimentation, abortion, euthanasia. At the beginning of the semester I explain to students that there's some pretty rough material we'll cover. I give them an out, that if they feel too uncomfortable to take part they can leave class for the day and get attendance points for talking to me in my office.
I remind them again particularly before he abortion debate, because by it's nature not only do we deal with abortion but questions of rape as well. I've never had someone abuse my policy. in fact each time it's used and I talk to students I am so thankful that I had the forethought to mention it. I've had students in my office crying over past events and my heart hurts for what they went through.
Still, I cannot wipe the material from the class. To do so would be a disservice to the students, even if it makes them uncomfortable. I am well aware what I teach in bioethics is triggering, but to give less would not allow the students to fully understand the material. I cannot remove the discussion of rape from ethics without doing a disservice to students, but that doesn't mean students shouldn't be made aware to some extent.
Personally I feel the warnings are up to the professors and policies would do more harm than good. My bioethics cant be treated as a math class, or a chem class, English or whatever. They are each different with different needs and to make a policy about trigger warnings in syllabi I think would only serve to hurt students and professors.
So that is that, Universities as a whole cannot be entirely safe spaces free from concepts that are challenging, free from things that make one remember past trauma. In part because to do so would cut necessary material, but also because such a thing is entirely personal.
by and far I think a better option is understanding on both sides, The professor understanding some students can have bad reactions to things and being flexible, and the student understanding that they must sometimes deal with uncomfortable material, material that will remind them of traumatic events perhaps or make them question their deepest held beliefs.
Educating faculty on issues is important, but once we get nitpicky and demanding regarding what can and cannot be said or taught, it does more harm than good in my opinion.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think the people asking for safe spaces want to never be uncomfortable, but are asking for some material to be censored as it can be extremely inflammatory.
The problem is sometimes, particularly in ethics, inflammatory material must be discussed to come to better answers. I cannot remove rape discourse from my classroom. At different parts of the semester I'll discuss racism in human experiments or abuse of mentally ill individuals, and I will ask some dark questions about acting against the wishes of the mentally ill, or the morality of forcing someone to be forced to keep their pregnancy to term.
In normal conversation asking "Is it morally acceptable to value certain lives less" is completely inappropriate, but in my class it's necessary. It's horrific in normal conversation to say "look, because you have X physical disability, you life is not worth as much than this person without" but in the context of organ transplants, I challenge my students to consider those questions so that they can critically think about current policies and even possible solutions (seriously, organ transplants have a metric that weighs the values of peoples lives and disability is considered)
My class can't both function to have people understand the policies and implications and remove inflammatory unpleasant material.
It sounds like other people are putting limits on other people regarding topics that would cause inner conflict?
There's plenty of stories of professors being asked not to address certain material. There's horror stories of professors and TAs being lambasted in social media campaigns over material (there was one where a Graduate instructor was harassed online and off after homosexuality and same sex marriage came up in the classroom and she shut the discussion down. A student didn't like the way she said it, she said that it wasn't up for discussion, and there was a huuuge mess over it to the point of legal action being discussed to protect her)
There's some policies about micro-aggressions being implemented here and there, but i don't know the details too well.
This is just the big topic at the moment in higher education, and some faculty are fucking terrified of the online mob mentality that some people bring to the table. I'll say for myself, the most uncomfortable I have ever been while teaching was with "race and gender" thankfully my class was lovely and a wonderful group of individuals, but I have never been so afraid of ever word coming out of my mouth, and I think overall that hurt the quality of my work. I think i did what was required. I think the students learned, but it's not as good compared to my work with bioethics.
Not that something like that didn't happen later lol. I once mispoke on the first day and say a class got out at 6:40 not 5:40. dumb slip of the tongue, it was correct on the syllabus and we got out on time on that day. But no one mentioned it and I didn't realize I did it till I got an email from the office assistant, cause a student went to her advisor, who complained to my dept head cause they thought I wasn't sticking to what it said on the course schedule. Student never questioned it or talked to me about it directly :\
Read an article recently where a Harvard Law professor described students request to not cover rape law because it made them uncomfortable. I find the mere concept laughable, it was the kind of thing that I found almost unbelievable. It's the territory of Terry Goodkind and Ayn Rand, except that those were worlds of fiction, I never believed there'd actually be people of adult age performing the equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears and screaming "La-la-la-la!" much less that they'd be encouraged or accepted.
Ugh... sorry for the ramble.. Nice to know there's people in academia who still believe in teaching thought and not just fact.
Yeah...I just, hearing some of the things students have done really makes me worry sometimes. I genuinely feel for those that have dealt with rape, or abortion, or whatever first hand. But if I were to have a student ask that I stop discussing rape in the context of bioethics, I'd have to just politely suggest they not take the course until they're in a better position to handle the discussion.
I do think everyone is entitled to an education, but I think some people have taken that to mean they are entitled to be given a certification without challenge, or that everyone should be able to ace everything. No.
Sometimes people aren't prepared and need time to get prepared, or need to be in a better mindset. I wish I knew this more in my undergrad. I would have taken the time to be a much better student rather than throw myself in headlong.
"[...]we're creating a generation RIPE for a demigod if we don't teach them there's more to the world than drifting safely with the current like a jellyfish."
Yep. This generation is, to put it bluntly, completely fucked.
It's absolutely not the case that the problem is social justice, or attempting to support those that have been victimized in some form. It's a matter of extremists doing extreme things, and this kind of censorship comes from the extremes of both the right and left.
My mention above of an instructor that got harassed wasn't from someone taking an activist standpoint but an extremely conservative one. Both extremes want discussion of certain materials to be wiped out. It's the extremism and censorship that the big issue I think. So I would say it's less "SJW" authoritarianism and more just Authoritarianism.
A more precise choice of words would have been "SJW-style," since it does seem to be that crowd who relies on social-media mobs, trigger warnings, microaggression language, etc. the vast majority of the time.
Like you said, though, that's not the core issue. Authoritarianism itself is, and every powerful faction will tend towards it. And it cannot be allowed to flourish if academia is going to retain its freedom and independence.
Props to you for doing what you could to help accomodate students, and to them for their understanding.
"There's some policies about micro-aggressions being implemented here and there, but i don't know the details too well."
^That's just terrifying. I'm sure you're aware how awfully flexible and dangerous that term can be when used as a weapon. Hopefully you'll be able to continue teaching difficult topics fearlessly.
For myself, I will say my warnings have been all i've ever needed, The only time it didn't entirely work out is for particular lesson, and that's more amusing to me that anything. I was covering human experimentation, which covers ww2 Nazi experiments. up to that point i'd gone into details of what happened, like with the Tuskegee experiment and such. For that I told them the basics of what was done and mentioned that I was glazing over it as it was very disturbing imagery, particularly the work of Mengele.
I take 5 min breaks cause they are loooong classes, and they asked me to spell Mengele so they could look it up on their phones. I said okay but warned them again that it was some nasty stuff and to be prepared. They said sure then "Oh my god!" and various cries as they actually looked it up. Thankfully it wasn't anything horrible, but yeah, they didn't question when I said something was bad after that.
As for the micro aggressions. I get the concept and don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but you are right in that it's a loose term. it doesn't lend well to policies I think and can sometimes be used as a weapon rather than a tool.
Still, I think on the other end there are a lot of people that feel entitled to certain things, or see a problem and don't fully understand what it is they are asking, or how their desires don't mesh with the overall purpose of something. This along with administration trying to make education more like a business has just really shifted the academic world around a bit.
btw, my daughter applied to WMU
My frame of reference is specifically from the LGBT community. It's important to have spaces where people can talk about sexual orientation and gender identity without fear of being "outed" or worse. But as far as I can tell, those spaces aren't designated as "free from uncomfortable stuff." But then again, the concept of the Trigger Warning began to surface after I graduated from college, so I don't know how things have changed.
I am a university student, in my first year, and I have the honor of attending an amazing school. I feel like the diverse culture and demographics of the student body has made my campus a very comfortable, interesting, and knowledgeable place to be.
I do not agree with censorship in the classroom. I feel like our society has become too much the victim, and this will only provoke that mindset even more. It is very disheartening to be unable to have a civil discussion with anyone because someone, somewhere, is offended or upset by the topic at hand. It is my belief that every topic should be discussed in a sensible and civil manner, whether people like it or not, we simply will no learn and grown without tackling these issues.
A simple "The content of this course is ______" at the beginning of the term and as a simple reminder before a tougher discussion should suffice. If the students in that class cannot handle those topics, perhaps they shouldn't be enrolled in that course or studying for that profession to begin with.
That's just my ten cents, though.
~Parka.
Also, real life must be faced in full after graduation. That's no picnic.