Definition of the safe spaces
Safe spaces are set up to offer an environment in which marginalized identities and hidden
experiences can be given a voice, allowing for acceptance and affirmation. Their use has a
chilling effect on free speech; and even that safe spaces are harmful to liberal democratic society
itself.
Safe spaces emerged in the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, before
being adopted by students. They offer protection from violence and harassment and
encourage marginalized groups to be able to speak to one another freely, generating
collective strength. Within an institutional context, safe spaces are often about reclaiming
unsafe space, where there has been a structural imbalance or history of oppression. Safe
spaces might include members of the dominant group or be organized along more
separatist lines to generate the best conditions for the relational work of recognizing and
mobilizing a shared history and identity and are usually enacted in student societies or
support groups on campus.
Moral communication
Weber 1958: How do we do justice to the responsibility that comes in speaking with
others? An ethics of ultimate ends operates on principles; it is about being right and if it
hurts people whilst achieving this, then the principles go unquestioned. An ethics of
responsibility, on the other hand, is not about being in the right, but about taking people
into account; when acting responsibly, no principle can excuse the harm done to any
individual in the pursuance of some end.
Levinas: defines violence as acting as if you are alone, as if your actions existed outside
of a relationship with another, or that the individuality of those who are touched by your
actions does not matter. It is in this facing-up, or, more accurately, in the encounter with a
face, that he locates responsibility. The Levinasian face communicates what is human,
what is precarious, what is injurable’. This idea of the face, as a marker of elusiveness
and nudity, has three consequences for an understanding of freedom:
The first consequence is that the face-to-face, as a confrontation with something we
cannot understand, that lies beyond, demands that we act with responsibility. The
inaccessibility of the other person – their irreducibility to thought – means that we can
never know them in the way that we think we know ourselves. Our ability to act without
such knowledge can cause harm even when we do not intend it.
The second consequence is that freedom is not here curtailed but directed instead towards
the other. The other does not counter my freedom by a display of power ‘but calls in
question the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. The face
speaks, silently, in its nudity, that thou shall not kill, a moral demand rather than an onto-
logical necessity. Freedom is intact – but responsibility consists of reigning it in so that
actions might touch, but do not harm, the other.
The final consequence is that understanding freedom in this way necessitates that we
, forgo any expectation of symmetry or reciprocation. Since to encounter the other is to
come face-to-face with otherness, to recognize that the other is absolutely other to me.
The fact that the ‘I’ and ‘the other’ are not interchangeable means that the relation to the
other is without expectation of reciprocity. You can sacrifice your own freedom, but you
cannot ask the same of anyone else;
Debate fetishism
Criticism of safe spaces is motivated by an idea of the academy as an environment of and
for debate. But it would be a mistake to conflate academia, as a movement through ideas,
with the university as a site where debate occurs amongst other things. Fabian Cannizzo
(2018) has argued that the university is imagined according to a persistent idea of the
Golden Age of Academia, an idealized past that sets contemporary values. Vik Loveday
(2015) highlights the way that working class students are made to feel that they do not
belong, not only because there is little institutional support for things like caring roles, but
because the dominant educational discourse casts working class culture as deficient.
Attacks on safe spaces operate with an idealized student body from an imaginary past:
white, middle class, cis-gendered and male.
We must recognize that there are circumstances in which debate is undesirable – or
actively unhelpful. Debate that is forced into the wrong location or targeted at those
already wronged without any sense of proportion. There are three consequences of debate
fetishism in the context of safe spaces:
First, the critics of safe spaces have positioned debate as the primary mode of
communication in the university in a way that primes it to reproduce sameness. Debate is
an exchange of statements, the statements governed by informal logic and the exchange
by rhetoric. Done well, it is an art. But it can only be done well when its rules or format
make sense under the generic conventions that govern the environment in which it is put
to use. And done badly, debate looks a lot like a series of reciprocal speech acts that lap
against each other and then recede, debaters taking it in turns to broadcast at each other.
Safe spaces are set up to perform the relational work of supporting neglected identities,
fostering common understanding and facilitating acceptance and affirmation. Debate in
this context makes little sense. That you cannot enter such a space to practice your
debating skills is entirely appropriate, since the whole purpose of it is to grant a voice
which is otherwise crowded out. Yet too often debate is used as a false flag to shut down
others, to refuse to listen, to justify a kind of moral deafness.
Second, the primacy of debate casts safe spaces as a threat to the values of the university,
which in turn configures those students who might need or want them as a contamination
of its culture. In a Derridean account of hospitality, welcoming difference into a space
should mean that the space is put into question. This means giving people a place, rather
than merely tolerating their presence in a space. In order to qualify for even this reduced
status, the host demands assimilation. A university that is not welcoming, that is not
hospitable to difference, that is envisioned as sterile or aseptic, reproduces the same;
