University of Chicago triggers a fresh debate about free speech on campus
The dean of students has issued a blunt rebuke to proponents of "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces"
By S.M. | VANCOUVER
IT IS safe to say that no welcome letter to incoming university students has attracted more attention, or inspired more tweets, than the missive John Ellison, the dean of students at the University of Chicago has sent to freshmen. After telling the class of 2020 that “our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression” is one of the “defining characteristics” of their new academic home, Mr Ellison noted a few things the newbies will not find on campus: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings’, 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.” “Trigger warnings” alert students to potentially distressing passages in literature or speeches.
His comments sparked predictably polarised responses. Many cheered the letter for standing up for cherished academic values. Geoffrey Stone, a law professor who chaired a faculty committee on freedom of expression at the University of Chicago, said “we've been deeply committed to the notion that we're here to learn from one another and to learn from the world and to study things and to figure out the answers”. The best recipe for this inquiry “is to hear all sides of everything”. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) praised the letter for “push[ing] back against the nationwide trend toward student-led calls for censorship”.
Some student leaders at the university criticised what they saw as an inhospitable message. They also detected hypocrisy in the statement of principles. “The most insidious threat to 'freedom of inquiry and expression' on campus right now is not trigger warnings or safe spaces”, the student-body president and vice-president wrote, “but rather the heavy-handed suppression of free speech and free press by the university administration”. And reflecting on the influence the dean seemed to be asserting over faculty members’ pedagogical choices, Jeet Heer issued this counter-charge in the New Republic: “The University of Chicago is attacking academic freedom” by pressuring professors to keep warnings off their syllabi.
The rhetorical excess on both sides may be unsurprising, given the broader culture war into which the letter lobs a rather pointed missile. But supporters and detractors of the welcome note are both exaggerating the stakes. Many colleges and universities have experimented with trigger warnings, but none currently require professors to issue them, and few students are demanding that their professors warn them about every conceivable upset. Most pedagogues who use trigger warnings reserve them for material with particularly disturbing depictions of rape and sexual assault and do not enumerate all the ways that Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” or Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” might trigger an emotional reaction. Cautions about the sky falling if these warnings are used—or not used—should be taken with a grain of salt.
One of the most unfortunate aspects of the debate, exacerbated by the letter and most responses to it, is the assumption that cancelling speeches, preserving safe spaces and issuing content warnings are all of a piece. They are not. It is clear why rescinding an invitation to a campus speaker because he might bring along a controversial message is inconsistent with a university’s mission of sponsoring free and vigorous debate. But it is less apparent why syllabus warnings or allowing groups to gather in “safe spaces” outside the classroom for discussion and commiseration are threats to freedom of speech.
Admittedly, composing content warnings in academic settings is an odd idea. Few professors are psychologists: they are not experts in what will set students off. Nor do they have training in how to help young adults cope with past trauma. Even the most thoughtful academics will view the material they teach through their own experiences, missing some potentially triggering materials and perhaps being unnecessarily over-sensitive with regard to others. But nobody thinks that film ratings and their accompanying justifications (“contains strong language, drug use and nudity”, for example) infantilise cinema-goers or ruin the surprise once the lights dim and the picture rolls. Likewise, it is unclear why a heads-up on a syllabus is an occasion to set a dean’s bow tie a-spinning.
