This week, the University of Chicago sent out a letter to their incoming class about their position on freedom of speech. The school stated that they “do not support ‘trigger warnings’” nor do they “condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces.’” The school describes safe spaces as a way to “retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with [a person’s] own." The school stands behind the priority of “building a campus that welcomes people of all backgrounds”. The school is the most prominent one to release such a statement to their students. With this statement, University of Chicago is defending the First Amendment by coming out against the censorship that follows the idea of safe spaces.
In the past few years, Safe Space Culture has become much more prominent. It has permeated past social media into society, especially at schools of higher learning. College and university administrations across the nation are forced to react to safe spaces because of the outcry of their student body. In Early Spring this year, a debate at Brown University was protested against because one of the participants had an stance on a topic that was non-congruent with some student’s experience. Last Halloween, Yale University sent out a statement that effectively asked their students not to have insensitive costumes. They asked young people not to be offensive.
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There are people that are aggressive against the school for releasing a statement. The basis of their argument is that an outright statement against free spaces and trigger-warnings was not the proper way to protect free speech. These people want to protect people that react poorly when something disagrees with their views.
Although there might be people that do have severe reactions after being triggered, a college campus is not the place to have safety. In an era of social media dominance, a significant amount of the interactions people have are filtered through a digital screen where if someone gets upset at something they can just make it go away. A college campus is the first taste of the real world that a lot of people are experiencing. A college campus is a place of creating and sharing ideas. Sharing ideas involves sharing all ideas, even ones that are counter to the ones you have. Some people are trying to make the real world more like the digital space where they can just get rid of something that they disagree with. That’s not how the real world works.
Trying to get rid of something by the sheer fact that you don’t agree with it and it makes you feel bad is downright censorship. Censorship is the death of free speech which is the death of freedom. People should be able to say whatever they want. If someone wants to be a hateful bigot. If someone wants to preach that the world is flat. If someone wants to tell me that I will burn in hell as a sinner. They should be able to do that because it means I can tell them they are wrong. I am not condoning hate speech. I am condoning free speech.
The world is not a safe space. We should not learn in one either.
