As a part of its Strategic Planning initiatives UTM is considering establishing safe zones on campus. Currently, the tactics stated by the Inclusion Task Force Worksheet call for “safe havens or comfort zones for groups or individuals who express concerns for safety, security, or privacy.”
While this objective is laudable because it seeks to protect students from physical harm, it should not be construed to mean protecting students from diverse ideas. There is a potential danger that safe zones might create a number of unintended consequences, which include creating unnecessary walls and hindering true diversity.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, noted in his article “Campuses are breaking apart into ‘safe spaces'” that campuses that start out with temporary spaces for special groups often end up being permanent ones.
“Who would have imagined that the original safe space motive—to explore issues in an inclusive environment—would so quickly give way to the impulse to quarantine oneself and create de facto cultural segregation?” said Furedi.
Furedi added that encouraging students to engage with unfamiliar ideas while also giving account for their own ideas use to be a hallmark of a vibrant academic institution.
“The popularity of identity politics among insecure millennials threatens to fracture campus life to the point that undergraduates are inhabiting separate spaces and leading parallel lives,” Furedi said.
Van Jones, a former adviser to President Barack Obama and UTM graduate, recently weighed in on this issue.
Jones, in an article in The World Post, said that while it is important for students to feel physically safe on campus with regard to physical abuse and sexual harassment, it is actually a “horrible” view to say, “I need to be safe ideologically, I need to be safe emotionally, I just need to feel good all the time.”
Jones compared the university to a gym where people are supposed to get stronger by working out their ideas with others. Because safe spaces sometimes have the purpose of insulating students from certain ideas, this contradicts the very notion of a university.
“Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity,” Jones said. “I’m not going to take the weights out of the gym. That’s the whole point of the gym.”
In light of these kind of free speech developments on campuses the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago drafted a statement in 2014 articulating its “overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University community.”
The University of Chicago document says, “[I]t is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
While the declaration says the university has a positive role in restricting speech that is unlawful, as with falsely defaming someone or speech that constitutes genuine harassment of an individual, these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of speech.
Echoing some of the same concerns, Tennessee legislators recently passed the Campus Free-Speech Act to provide clarification regarding First Amendment rights for public universities.
Instead of walling off speech, the new act declares campuses like UTM actually have the responsibility to “promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.”
While students should be protected against physical harm, they should not be prevented from being exposed to diverse ideas during their college career.
Dr. Arthur W. Hunt, professor of communications, served on the Inclusion Task Force Committee but his ideas and opinions do not necessarily reflect the group as a whole.
