Safe space in the college classroom: contact, dignity, and a kind of publicness
While the idea of safe space is not new, questions regarding its place on campus have been
under-theorized thus far. Supporters of safe space hold that ensuring it helps support and scaffold
students while they work through intellectual or emotional challenges; with its aid students learn
how to responsibly enter into difficult engagements and discussions. Opponents argue that such
interventions coddle students, thwart free expression, and diminish rigorous critical thinking in
the name of emotional support; student comfort takes priority over difficulty or challenge. I
argue that universities must commit to ensuring such safety in classrooms and teaching-and-
learning spaces, and that there are three good reasons for doing so: a moral reason, an
educational reason, and a public reason.
I reintroduce a substantive conception of publicness. That publicness has to do with public
opinion, discussion, and deliberation; it is publicness as a mode of living, replete with
engagement with others and conjoint action, which when enacted infuses sites with an active and
dynamic public aspect. I argue that full participation in this kind of public action can only
flourish if and when we enjoy stability and substantiation preceding our entry into the public fray;
in the context of the college classroom, the kind of safety I outline serves just this function.
The safety of safe space
Question of dignity
Ordinarily, to be safe in this way means we can avoid harm, injury to our bodies. Instead what is
at stake in these calls is another sense of safety, a kind of emotional safety. Emotional safety has
to do with our affective states, with our psycho- logical responses. Breaches of emotional safety
can be quite varied, but their overarching com- mon trait is that of creating an experience that
is/that feels negative. In describing the safety of a classroom, Callan (2016) dubs this kind of
emotional safety ‘dignity safety,’ insofar as it ensures that ‘in a given social environment (one) is
to be free of any reasonable anxiety that others will treat one as having an inferior social rank to
theirs. Emotional safety can be especially exposed for students who are members of marginalized
groups. Implicit bias may not even be consciously or intentionally breachful, but when we
consider these microaggressions cumulatively we realize that over time they add up to a pattern,
an ongoing low- grade assault. We must consider, too, that it is not only other people that can
distress – the very concepts, content, and/or material of a course can create degradation for
students.
This intellectual safety, how- ever, is not the sense of safety we should aim to preserve in the
classroom. We look to ensure emotional (dignity) safety for students while at the same time
intentionally fostering intellectual danger for them. allan offers a litmus test involving a
distinction between humility and humiliation. One’s ability to operate in a space as other
participants can/do indicates that a sufficient level of emotional (dignity) safety is at work;
however, anxiety that one is perceived, understood, and ultimately treated unfairly in a classroom
indicates a true dignity threat is afoot. The content of an argument or idea may mark a classroom
challenge as a humiliation (the derogation of respect and degradation of one’s dignity) rather than
a humbling (the troubling of one’s ideas). If students can begin learning to differentiate the
experience of humiliation from that of being humbled, they have one basic way to begin
assessing the challenging comments, actions, and climates they experience in the classroom space
(Callan 2016). Yet in many cases it can be difficult to differentiate the experiences of humiliation
