There were plenty of cheers when the University of Chicago sent a letter to incoming students making it clear that the school didn’t condone the creation of safe spaces “where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
Of course it wouldn’t be long before the university came under fire for its stand.
The @UChicago statement condemning safe spaces and trigger warnings is a “perverse document,” @HeerJeet writes. https://t.co/ajUZ5jHeRh
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) August 25, 2016
Perverse? That’s pretty strong condemnation. Jeet Heer made the charge in the New Republic Thursday, comparing the letter to the burqini bans that are popping up around France.
If professors don’t feel free to implement their own policies on such things as trigger warnings, he concludes, then the university administration “is clearly making a stance on a pedagogical decision that has traditionally been left up to professors.” He adds, “Academic freedom means that professors get to design their syllabus, not administrators,” and the letter could have a chilling effect on educators.
https://twitter.com/leederc/status/768864802173227008
.@HeerJeet False. @UChicago is making it clear that it encourages diverse opinions and is not in the business of making students comfortable
— Tommy Heyboer (@TommyHeyboer) August 25, 2016
you're bass ackwards on what academic freedom means. Trigger warnings and safe spaces harm intelligent discourse and learning.
— Jordan Detmers (@JordanDetmers) August 25, 2016
Recommended
.@HeerJeet I usually love your stuff, but this is absurd. Spirit of Dean's letter is to avoid treating students like infants.
— Tom Zoellner (@tomzoellner) August 25, 2016
https://twitter.com/thor_benson/status/768914369040175104
The policies promote academic freedom by limiting the ability of idiots like you to limit freedom of speech.
— John (@mercatiliberi) August 25, 2016
So we get more freedom by restricting pedagogical decisions of professors. How does that work again?
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 25, 2016
The tyranny of students is a far greater imposition on pedagogy.
— John (@mercatiliberi) August 25, 2016
In the real world, university administrators have far more power than students. You are living a fantasy land.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 25, 2016
About that … a complicating factor here is the assumption that, in 2016, administrators actually exert control over professors, who have control of their own classrooms; in many cases, it’s the students who are exerting their influence over the administration — and winning.
Rather than accept the curriculum in place when they accepted admittance to the University of Seattle, for example, students held a three-week occupation of the administration building, demanding that the school scrap its Eurocentric curriculum, decentralize whiteness, and instead “focus on the evolution of systems of oppression such as racism, capitalism, [and] colonialism.”
The school caved and put a besieged dean on leave, with student protesters claiming that her presence had been “profoundly damaging and erasing, with lasting effects on our mental and emotional well-being.”
https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/738407820207480834
The dean’s racist transgression? She reportedly used the n-word in suggesting that a student read comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory’s autobiography, the title of which is simply … the n-word. That was her voluntary pedagogical choice, and she was run off campus for it.
In a surprising show of spine, Oberlin’s president recently said no to a 14-page list of student demands that the school set up “special, segregated black-only ‘safe-spaces’ across campus” and pay an $8.20 an hour stipend to organizers of black student protests — less than a year after commencement speaker Michelle Obama urged graduating Oberlin students to leave their comfort zones rather than retreat into safe spaces in the real world.
https://twitter.com/jrireland1/status/678320232197419009
When students themselves demand black-only safe spaces, is the University of Chicago really so out of line to tell incoming freshmen not to expect to find them there?
https://twitter.com/SteenKJW/status/768847927410237440
Nonsense. Trigger warnings are opportunities for self censorship. If that's what you want, you don't belong at UofC.
— texasinDC (@Texas2DC1) August 25, 2016
Its the premise required of trigger warnings: that students have the right to curate their own academic experience that is denied.
— texasinDC (@Texas2DC1) August 25, 2016
* * *
Related:
Danny Glover rallies ethnic studies hunger strikers; University president begins negotiations https://t.co/nPu70x64T5
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) May 11, 2016
Join the conversation as a VIP Member