The past few weeks have been eventful, tumultuous and sometimes thorny ones for student protesters at several colleges and universities across the country. These protests have largely been based in race issues, the largest of which saw effects manifest just two days ago in Columbia, Missouri when, on Monday, the heads of the University of Missouri System and its Columbia campus announced their resignation. This action came amid allegations that they had not responded to widespread racial issues on campus.

A few days previously, in New Haven, Connecticut, weeks of tension surrounding alleged racial insensitivity came to a boiling point at Yale University. After professors issued several advisories on acceptable, racially sensitive Halloween costumes, another professor, a live-in “master” in one of the campus residences, responded with an email expressing fears that liberal arts campuses will become “places of censure and prohibition.” The email drew ire from many Yale students, and culminated Monday with thousands of students gathering to call for an end to racism on campus.

These larger incidents have given rise to a rash of other, smaller protests across the country. Walkouts have already been planned at Ithaca College and Smith College, both in the northeast.

These protests are, by and large, not harmful. Indeed, they bring up important issues of race, representation and respect at liberal arts institutions that are still largely attended by a significant majority of white, privileged students. This point must be made very clear: the recent protests bring up weighty issues that are very worth fighting for and discussing.

But that element of discussion is also where they can run into complicated territory. In both of these major protests at Missouri and Yale, the scent of censorship has been in the air, and much of that has to do with the concept of the “safe space.”

Safe spaces are generally defined as places where anyone can relax and express their views, without fear that they will be made uncomfortable or unsafe because of their gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or any other personal feature. In theory, such spaces sound innocuous at worst. But, as we have seen in the Missouri and Yale protests, they can snowball.

In Missouri, protestors celebrating the ousting of their president in the school’s quad engaged in a confrontation with a student journalist, who was shooting photos on a freelance assignment for ESPN. He approached the camp to take pictures, but was told to get away. Several protestors chanted “Hey hey, ho ho. Reporters have got to go,” and one administrator told the photographer to “leave these students alone” in their “personal space.”

In Yale’s case, the “safe space” concept reared its head in the aftermath of the resident professor’s much-derided email about censorship, in which she posed the question “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

It is a valid question, and a valid intellectual problem to meditate upon. But that is not how it was taken by a significant portion of the student body, members of whom drafted an open letter to the professor in question that read, “We are not asking to be coddled… [but] simply ask that our existences not be invalidated on campus. This is us asking for basic respect of our cultures and our livelihoods.”

That statement is a gross exaggeration; the email did not disrespect anyone’s culture or livelihood. It merely posed a question that went, marginally and respectfully, against the dominant narrative on how to deal with race on college campuses. And that disagreement, apparently, tore down the safe space walls.

Safe spaces, in these contexts, are being abused. The incidents at Yale and Missouri are not unique. But they, and others like them, are representative of a trend at many colleges and universities, many of them institutions of the liberal arts. Students are using the concept of these spaces to go beyond feeling “safe” and to create a shield against any possible criticism or disagreement. By claiming that feelings are hurt or that they feel invalidated, students allow emotion to proliferate at the expense of rational discussion.

This is not to say that emotion has no place in academic life. Emotionally charged discourse can be extremely powerful. But we cannot claim that opposing arguments are unacceptable because they hurt us, or make us feel invalid. By saying this, we take away our own power. We are not invalid. In fact, we are fully capable of standing up for ourselves, and engaging in legitimate arguments about what we believe in, whatever that may be.

There is still a place for safe spaces on college campuses and otherwise. But there is a much larger place for unsafe spaces, for spaces where our opinions are challenged, where we are forced to legitimately consider and respond to arguments that belie our own beliefs.
We cannot hide behind our safe spaces.