Wesleyan U. President Claims Safe Spaces Promote Intellectual Diversity
“for different people at different times, safety can mean different things.”
This is absurd. The very concept of safe spaces is about having a place to retreat from words and ideas you don’t like.
Campus Reform reports:
Wesleyan pres defends ‘safe spaces’, claims they can ‘promote intellectual diversity’
A Connecticut university president is championing an effort to begin “destigmatizing” “safe spaces” on college campuses, claiming that the concept is necessary for “intellectual diversity,” despite growing evidence that, in practice, the concept does just the opposite.
Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth defended the notion of “safe spaces” on college campuses in a recent New York Timesop-ed titled “Don’t Dismiss ‘Safe Spaces’,” characterizing critics of the practice as people who “claim to worry” about preserving free expression at colleges and universities.
According to Roth, a “safe space” is “the attempt to make sure all students are made to feel welcome in or outside the classroom.” He concedes that the “coddling of students who feel fragile” is “counterproductive,” but later argues that “for different people at different times, safety can mean different things.”
Despite acknowledging the risks of “infantilizing students by overprotecting them,” Roth insists that the practice of creating “safe spaces” is still an important and necessary one, arguing that “the outright dismissal of safe spaces can amount to a harmful disregard for the well-being of students.”
Doing away with the concept altogether “can perpetuate environments where the entitled continue to dominate those around them” and may cause students to “never learn how to build a more equitable, inclusive community,” says Roth, referencing suicide and mental health crises on some college campuses.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Amazing how the university system, universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which arose in the 12th century (in what is now Italy, France, and England), flourished for centuries without safe spaces.
‘Cause nothing screams “intellectual diversity” like being only around people that think and act exactly the way you do. Diversity is the opposite of unity.
I have to say that I was encouraged that even the readers of the NYT seem to realize how preposterous this oped was as the comments were running 80% on the side of ridicule with very few true defenders of Roth.
We are creating a nation of Eloi. That’s not a good thing.