Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education

Similar things are happening on our university campuses. Between 1971 and 2015, there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of Asian American students enrolled in our schools, and the number of students who self-identify as mixed race has grown too – up to 12 percent in 2015. The Latino/Latinx population has experienced similar growth. Over time, it has become clear that our campuses have become increasingly diverse, and that is a wonderful and important thing.

These debates obviously play out in the headlines. We can consider the lawsuit by Asian students at Harvard that brought attention to private or elite colleges’ admission policies as one example, but I think it is a sign of some of the challenges we face as we think of our universities as sites of political action. There are many ways to describe this Harvard lawsuit: on one level, it is an assault on affirmative action. And, at the same time, there are many complicated cross currents. Some people think the university has not been getting it quite right; others call for a change in policy or direction to ensure that students have the ability to come together in single sex clubs.

Let me begin with the idea of safe spaces. This may be the one that is most familiar to you because it has been most in the press. One of the best case studies that we have is from the University of Chicago, the dean’s letter from August 2016. You may have had this experience of either being a parent or a student and getting a letter from the dean welcoming you to the school year. Having been somebody who writes these letters, they are very boring to write, and they are even worse to read. But the dean’s letter from the University of Chicago grabbed a lot of attention and it made these letters much more interesting, at least for a while.

The third paragraph of that letter reads, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings” – we will discuss what those warnings are in a minute – “we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” This language created a debate among those of us who run schools about whether this is the right message to send to an increasingly diverse group of students who are arriving on campus. You can imagine the debate that ensued: some said this is precisely what we need; this is exactly the pushback against a series of overreaches by the left seeking to force a version of diversity, equity, and inclusion on these communities; and, in fact, it is an opportunity to stand up for robust debate. Others said this is the most unwelcoming thing you could have sent, particularly if the student and parent come from an underrepresented minority group or is a marginalized member of a community. Saying that there should not be these types of safe spaces was exactly what you don’t want to hear as you walk onto a campus.

One of the reasons this caused a particular kerfuffle is that the dean who wrote the letter, Jay Ellison, was in fact an advisor to a safe space on the Chicago campus: the LGBTQ space that called itself the Safe Space for that group of students. In my book, I make an argument that, in fact, we need to have some safe spaces on our campuses just as we need to have brave spaces. And I think the LGBTQ community that is created on many of our campuses is precisely the type of safe space that we should have. I think, likewise, we might say that speech rules apply in certain places, like a Hillel on a campus, where you do not allow hate speech. You would not have a member of the KKK walk into a space like a Hillel and say certain things in that environment. It strikes me that those are reasonable rules that you might set up for a safe space. Likewise, you might have a different set of rules in other places within a university. Those might be determined to be brave spaces: environments in which students would be expected to be exposed to things that would make them uncomfortable. Again, we can come back to that tradeoff. But I would make the case that we need safe spaces for our communities, just as we need brave spaces.

My second example is trigger warnings. The idea here is that before walking into a class or a lecture, the expectation would be that somebody would give you a warning that you might be triggered in a certain way. A classic example would be in an English class and you are told before you opened a book that there might be some violent rape scenes, for example, in the book. If you, as a teacher, knew that one of the members of the class had experienced sexual assault at some point in their life, you might say that it is reasonable to warn somebody that they may be triggered by something they were about to read. Likewise, before you were to show a particularly graphic movie, you might offer a warning to a student before that happened. Of course, the reaction to trigger warnings has not been universally positive. There have been a number of articles and, in fact, a book on this topic called The Coddling of the American Mind that makes the case that this is precisely what we should not do; that, in fact, the idea that there should be somebody standing up and warning you about what you are going to experience rather than having people experience it and then debate it afterwards is the downfall of our civilization or, in a slightly simpler form, it is undercutting the academic integrity of our institutions.

I think trigger warnings have been a topic of debate because they suggest some infringement on intellectual freedom. Let’s think about these trigger warnings: if you are requiring somebody to say something are you, in fact, undercutting the academic freedoms that a teacher has in their classroom? The way that I have treated this at Andover is I believe that trigger warnings are simply good manners if they are used in an appropriate way. For instance, I, as a teacher, might use them in a certain setting if I am worried about a particular student or a group of students and the experience they are about to have. At the same time, I don’t think it is a good idea to mandate them. I cannot imagine telling a teacher you must use trigger warnings in a particular way or to require that they be used across an institution. And institutions have done all of the above. There have been requirements around trigger warnings, there has been a middle ground like the one I am suggesting, and there have been statements, such as the University of Chicago’s, that suggest you should not have trigger warnings and students should not expect trigger warnings.

My third example: microaggressions. This one may require a little more explanation. On our campuses, particularly as they have become more diverse, I hear both from students and faculty that at different times, there are slights that are expressed toward them in ways that are difficult to handle within the context of an academic community. A microaggression might be something that is said and experienced by some people in one way and by others in another way. An example that is often used is of President Obama being described as an articulate person. This statement may be experienced differently by an African American than by a white person. Why? Because there is a presumption that black people are not as articulate as white people. While that might have been a perfectly well-meaning statement and the intent was simply to say that the president is well-spoken, how it is received and the impact of that statement may be quite different. That is an example of a microaggression.

Now, this may not be the best example because the president of the United States has a great deal of power. You could imagine somebody walking into a university setting or a school, where in that place that person has much less power. Importantly, what students will tell you is that this is also wrapped up in the concept of intersectionality: the notion that when somebody walks into an environment like a historically white male institution, that student feels or experiences the environment as being a marginalizing space. It may be that they experience these microaggressions along multiple dimensions. When you think about the way in which we lead our institutions and how we care about students, as we have more diverse sets of students, they experience their education in very different ways. This becomes complicated from a policy perspective. Do you ban microaggressions as you work toward a more inclusive and more equitable environment? There are many examples that I have experienced as an administrator in which you have to pull people in who have been part of one of these conversations and explain the extent to which these words that you might not have intended as being aggressive have had an impact on somebody that is very different than they might have had some time ago. For people who may have been involved in an example like this, I think it makes them feel like they are racist because they are being told that they have harmed somebody based on their race or they may feel that they are being told they are misogynist because they said something based on gender that they did not intend. At the same time, the impact is very real and for some people, the exhaustion and the way in which it affects their education is very different than it might have been decades ago. In some ways, I think we are pitting some of these values against one another.

My fourth example has to do with speakers who are not allowed on our campuses. One of the most challenging topics over the last several years has been whether institutions should provide a platform for all speakers. We have several recent examples: Charles Murray was invited by a conservative student group to give a talk at Middlebury College. His appearance led to a physical altercation on the campus. Milo Yiannopoulos is a provocateur. He has a lot of topics on which he is controversial if not outright obnoxious. The challenge for university administrators who have had him visit their campuses, particularly if it is a state campus, is that you are bound by the First Amendment. At the same time, it ends up costing between half a million and a million dollars to pay for the necessary security to allow the speech to happen. An interesting question to consider is whether there is a requirement for a university to allocate half a million dollars or even a million dollars for security, whether that comes from state money, tuition dollars, or the endowment, to have a speaker come to campus, who many of the members of the community do not wish to hear. That is a tricky question, even though I have a very strong impulse to support the First Amendment rights of those both to hear and to speak on university campuses.

Chelsea Manning was offered a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School and then the fellowship was rescinded after some pressure, potentially from government sources. Christine Lagarde was invited to Smith College and then uninvited on the grounds that she represented capitalism or something of that sort. And these are just a few examples. Is it important that speakers who have controversial views be able to provide the provocation that they seek on a university campus? In general, the answer, of course, is yes. We certainly support this on state university campuses, in part because the First Amendment requires it. It is a little trickier for those of us who lead private institutions.

There is an assumption that students are not supportive of having provocative speakers on their campuses. We have data from an organization called FIRE that found that 93 percent of students agree that schools should have a variety of guest speakers on campus. I have found in my own environment at Andover that many of our faculty are less eager to have a wide range of perspectives represented among speakers, but students actually want a wider range. FIRE data also found that more than half of students (56 percent) agree that there are times when a college or university should withdraw a guest speaker’s invitation after the event has been announced. And relatively few students feel that it is appropriate to disrupt a speaker when they come, although certainly when they do, it makes headlines.

My final example is the renaming of spaces and symbols on our campuses. I think one of the ways in which this topic plays out most visibly is the fact that we certainly have, on a campus like Harvard’s or Andover’s, virtually all our campus symbols representing white men. This is so for a variety of reasons: because of the leadership on these campuses, because of who the donors are, because of those we have honored. We have a local example: the debate over Harvard Law School’s shield. As you may know, Harvard Law School was founded as part of the university. Thanks in part to a gift from the family of Isaac Royall to establish either a chair in medicine or law, the university chose law. That chair grew into the law school. The chair still exists and is, in fact, used by a member of the faculty. A little more than a hundred years later, the law school adopted the Royall family crest as its shield. It turns out, however, that the Royall family generated the funds through slavery that ended up founding this chair and the law school. They were a plantation owning family. They were British by birth, but they created the funds on the backs of slaves, and it was those funds that then founded the law school and it is this family crest that the law school has been using. The holder of this chair for many years has given a really wonderful lecture about the Royall chair, talking about the family and its background. But this prompted a conversation about whether the law school should be using this shield. Martha Minow, dean of the law school at the time, did what I think any administrator should have done; she used it as an educational experience and as an opportunity to bring the community together around whether or not that shield should continue to be used.

The committee ended up with a split decision. Some of the faculty and students on the committee decided that the school should come up with a new shield and there were reasons why that was a good idea. Two members of the committee dissented: Annette Gordon-Reed, a faculty member and historian, and a student. They wrote a wonderful dissent that basically said you should not whitewash this particular piece of history. They recommended keeping the shield and using it as a teaching tool. I believe that the decision is now in the hands of the Corporation of Harvard. By the way, there is a beautiful monument at Harvard that looks at some of this history and this is a great example of how to handle this kind of a dispute.

I would like to share a few other facts. One of the unfortunate aspects of this topic is the way in which the press has been describing this as a generation that hates free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. I live with 1,100 students on a high school campus. I can assure you that the data that I am going to share with you are true. According to data from the Knight Foundation, high school support for the First Amendment is the highest in the last ten years, and it has been increasing, which I think is quite important to note. Students worry about what is happening in our country and in ways that I think are pretty savvy. They worry about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom for people to assemble peacefully, and freedom for people to petition the government. In each of these areas, they perceive that these rights are less secure.

In terms of protecting citizens’ free speech rights and promoting an inclusive society that is welcoming to diverse groups, there is some good news here. What is interesting to me is the idea that free speech or free expression has changed from being the zone of the left to one that is absolutely the purview of the right. When I think about the most important speech in the nineteenth century about free expression, Frederick Douglass’s speech, “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” comes to mind: “We need to have the right to free speech so we can make the case for an end to slavery.” If we think back to the 1960s, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a group of radical lefties. Well, not exactly. One of the reasons why this is so complicated today is that for many of the administrators on campuses who are being pushed hard by their students, they are the same lefty radical students from the 1960s who are saying, “I’m the good guy! I believe in these things. This is really important.” And yet, they are being perceived by students as being out of step with the moment that we are in.