Pushback Against ‘Safe Spaces’

The message was long overdue. And this was not the action of some rogue dean. Ellison’s boss, University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on August 26, “Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education.” Zimmer made it clear that “Universities cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for confronting ideas and thereby learning to make informed judgments in complex environments.”

In a vacuum, their stance on academic freedom might not seem particularly aggressive. Even just a decade ago, it would have seemed banal. A year ago, however, the whole of higher education seemed engaged in a bonfire of the humanities, after racially charged student protests at the University of Missouri forced the president and chancellor to resign.

From there, the conflagration spread to other campuses, in incidents of increasing absurdity. At Yale, lecturer Erika Christakis resigned her teaching post and left an administrative job in May after months of ongoing controversy. Her crime? She responded, mildly, to an email warning students about offensive Halloween costumes: “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?”

Reading between the lines of Ellison’s letter and Zimmer’s op-ed, one might fairly conclude that the answer to Christakis’s question is “yes.” The belief that academic freedom should be swept aside in favor of “safe spaces,” where a hierarchy of identity politics determines what is said in and out of the classroom, seemed to sweep the nation’s campuses last year, and there’s no reason to believe the enthusiasm dissipated over the summer.

The response to the University of Chicago salvos was proof of that. Vox published a riposte by Kevin Gannon, proprietor of a blog called “The Tattooed Professor.” Gannon’s dismay over Chicago’s decision to address “the purported scourge of ‘political correctness’ ” was likely representative of many left-wing professors. The objection boiled down to an assertion that student protests were justified, and administrators looking to rein in their excesses are wrong.

“The Virginia Tech students who protested their university’s invitation to Charles Murray to deliver a lecture [in March] weren’t some sort of intellectual Gestapo. .  .  . Murray is a racist charlatan,” Gannon wrote. “This isn’t a violation of academic freedom. It’s an upholding of scientific standards and the norms of educated discourse—you know, the type of stuff that colleges and universities are supposed to stand for, right?” The breathless and untrue accusations of racism against Murray have been lodged for 22 years, ever since the publication of his seminal work The Bell Curve, and ignore his expansive body of work as a social scientist.

One can only argue that students are taking a stand against racism if the definition of racism has been expanded to cover everything that student activists don’t want to hear. Student protests got Condoleezza Rice disinvited from speaking at Rutgers’s 2014 commencement. That same year, Hillary Clinton not only spoke at UCLA, she was paid the “special university rate” of $300,000 for the privilege. Both women are former secretaries of state. Both controversially supported the Iraq war. And yet, one is black, and the other is white.

The University of Chicago is also not responding to some imaginary scourge. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in February, Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez was “shouted right out of [the] room” at the University of Chicago.

Another rejoinder to the University of Chicago came on Twitter and in a lengthy blog post from the author John Scalzi, an alumnus of the school. He attempted to make the argument that those outside the liberal bubble might also come to rue the new rules. “The conservatives gloating about [the University of Chicago] ‘No Safe Spaces’ policy don’t appear to think it will apply to them, too, the dear wee lads,” he wrote.

This is ludicrous bordering on risible. Conservatives, whether students or visiting speakers, have been accustomed for decades to a hostile reception at college campuses. (Years ago, in order to get my required “Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance” credit at a state university, I took a course in which part of the final exam consisted of writing an essay about how the teachings of the Catholic church were responsible for forcing women to perform degrading sex acts in Latin American countries.)

At its core, much of the criticism of the University of Chicago’s new policy seems to betray a total lack of confidence by its fans that the current, virulent strain of campus leftism can withstand any opposition. In response to the Vox piece, progressive columnist Amanda Marcotte tweeted, “So no ‘safe spaces’ means atheists can march into churches and start dissing believers, right? After all, freedom!” Columnist Jonathan Chait, whose liberal credentials are not in doubt, responded, “This is the dispute. Should a campus be a place of open inquiry, or a place to preach settled dogma like a church?” Chait seems to understand that in order for liberalism to survive and thrive, its ideas must be contested. Marcotte, tellingly, seems less confident the current iteration of campus progressivism can survive contact with real-world criticism.

There’s considerable evidence that such lack of confidence might be justified. A crude indication that “safe spaces” and campus identity politics might not thrive in a robust marketplace of ideas is that they’re failing in the actual marketplace. Since the University of Missouri made national news for letting student protests consume its campus, the backlash has been punishing. This fall, undergraduate enrollment is down 8 percent—a loss of 2,100 students. Graduate enrollment is down 7 percent. (By contrast, enrollment at Missouri State went up 770 students and is at an all-time high.) Mizzou has had to shut down four dorms, its credit rating has been downgraded, and the school announced last spring it was facing a budget shortfall of $32 million.

Colleges simply cannot afford to become objects of national ridicule and disgust, especially those that depend on political support. Between 2003 and 2013 the cost of tuition has risen nearly three times the rate of inflation—dramatically more than medical costs, food, or housing. Federal student loan debt is more than $1 trillion and exceeds America’s collective credit card debt. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s response to this is a proposal simply to make public college “free” for families earning less than $125,000 a year. Conservatives, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t mind if the more liberal institutions simply went out of business.

As for determining which colleges are more committed to free inquiry than to dogma, the University of Chicago’s affirmation of free speech remains an outlier. Last month it was reported that Chancellor Nicholas Dirks at the University of California, Berkeley, in a spectacular display of cowardice, had spent $9,000 to build an escape hatch out of the back of his office after student protesters forcibly occupied it in spring 2015.

But the University of Chicago is not alone, either. As student protests were gathering unflattering attention last fall, one of the first significant voices to speak up for reason and free speech was Purdue president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who sent a campus-wide email encouraging Purdue to be “steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.” Daniels has also successfully worked with Purdue’s student government to eliminate the school’s restrictive speech codes. Prior to his tenure, students at Purdue couldn’t even post things on bulletin boards without preapproval. Purdue this fall held a panel discussion on free speech during freshman orientation.

But as perhaps the highest profile Republican in academia, Daniels has been careful to promote free speech as a civic virtue, rather than part of a political agenda. To that end, he’s brought in liberal speakers such as Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, to address the topic. And when Daniels saw the University of Chicago’s effort to reaffirm their academic freedom policies, he called up the school and asked if he could adopt some of the same language. Since then, Daniels reports that “eight or nine” other schools have also looked to Chicago as a model for beefing up their own policies. It’s a small movement, but it’s a movement nonetheless.

Daniels has also worked to meet with student protesters and engage them in meaningful dialogue. That’s harder to do than it sounds. After a few hundred students protested at the school last fall, Daniels invited a dozen or so of the leaders to his office for an hour-long conversation about their concerns.

“At one point, I said to them, ‘You know, in a few years, you’ll be leaders of various organizations and businesses, and I promise you, you’ll respond a lot better to suggestions, recommendations, and proposals than demands,’ ” he tells The Weekly Standard. “ ’Just a little hint.’ ”

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.