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Safe spaces are essential for free debate

A safe space is somewhere that allows anyone to exist without worry of being marginalised or made to feel unsafe due to their gender, sex, race, sexuality, religious belief and cultural background, age or mental or physical ability.

It sounds like an ideal place to be, but the concept has been attacked for moly-coddling students and limiting, even endangering, free speech. In the words of our Vice-Chancellor, it is “incompatible with university learning.”

But, if identity politics has taught us anything, it is that due to historical, political, social and economic factors, certain groups of people are indeed forced to suffer more than others. The traditional university is already tailored to be a safe space for people who are not part of various groups: Western, white, able, cis-heterosexual men are less likely to face discrimination in their academic life, they are less likely to face violence that could interfere with their studies, and they study a curriculum that is mainly about them, for them. The views of others are hardly represented in academic life; you can easily graduate without ever having to face them.

If we consider such complexities of power, it becomes clear that an active effort is required to make the university a good and fair learning environment for all students. This is where safe spaces come in.

Indeed, universities are meant to be challenging and to drag people out of their intellectual comfort zones. But a certain kind of security is essential to healthy learning. Namely, the certainty of being protected from violence, and that of being seen as a person as worthy as others.

A look at statistics can confirm this: every year, in Oxford, female students do worse in their finals than male students. Women are also more subject to physical and emotional violence, their history is cancelled out of curricula, and they are socialised to be less likely to express their opinions in classes and thus create more stimulating connections with their teachers.

Given this, it is imperative for the University to actively engage in making campuses safer, more welcoming and more supportive to female students. This does not entail censorship. The fight is not to make every existing space a safe one, but to ensure that the general university space that every student must participate in is safe for all. The lack of opportunity to engage with this history in a healthy and productive way is exactly what forces a confrontational approach outside of official university processes. A safe general university space is not incompatible with a challenging environment. It gives people the breathing room to truly engage with difficult issues in tutorials, seminars, and essays.

In the same way, a rape victim asking for trigger warnings to be placed on texts is not refusing to confront the reality of the violence that they know only too well, nor are they asking for the texts to be censored and removed from university contexts. They are asking for the opportunity to prepare themselves for the subject to be able to engage with it on their own terms, in ways that are more likely to bring interesting ideas and less likely to bring an emotional breakdown.

This leads to the accusation that safe spaces cover students in cotton-wool. But this ignores two important points. Firstly, a student body that actively engages with the problems of the traditional university, that challenges the harmful ideas present in its functioning and proposes solutions, does not comprise a bunch of scared young people. Rather, it is made up of bold thinkers who are trying to improve the status quo.

Secondly, this is not a question of offence or being upset, but of real conditions of violence. A university that neutrally welcomes transphobic discourse in all of its spaces, without tact or basic common sense, does not just upset students. It enables the diffusion of ideas that lead to transgender students being beaten-up when they walk out of their rooms, being kicked out of apartments, losing jobs.

Indeed, universities are place where ideas can and must be challenged. But what we cannot challenge is people’s humanity. It is still perfectly possible to have debates on transphobia in a space that people can opt out of, like debating societies or specific events. Safe spaces encourage academia to rethink the canon, to tell stories of murder and suffering from the perspective of the murdered, instead of that of the victorious murderer. A movement for safe spaces makes universities think carefully about the implications of the ideas they propagate and the actions they take, while keeping in mind the complications of history and politics, of power.

Safe spaces encourage every member of the University to keep in mind the experience of marginalised students, and the very real, concrete suffering that can stem from bigoted ideas. Thus, they encourage us to think of ways to enable discussion without propagating hate

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