These days, outrage has become a daily meme as fierce debate rages around definitions of safety and freedom of speech. One side’s outrage is subject to another side’s ridicule. To gain a more precise and complex understanding of how we use outrage to further (or regress) cultural debate, 11&more is returning to insights from three conversations that we had in 2016, conversations that are not related to the election.

In this first installment, we discuss the letter that UChicago sent in August to freshmen where it stated its position against trigger warnings and safe spaces. In upcoming weeks, we will publish conversations about writer Lionel Shriver’s declaration, “I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad,” and Disney’s representation of the Polynesian demigod Maui, which has been accused by some as perpetuating negative stereotypes of Polynesian bodies.

August 2016:  UChicago—Outrage vs. Overreaction

Jia Jia: The freshmen welcome letter just got interesting. The University of Chicago’s sent one that includes a section on freedom of ideas:

“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.”

This is being seen as a response to campus activism in the past few years calling for limits around expression/ speech based on the potential for certain views or practices to offend. For example, in 2014, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, withdrew as commencement speaker at Smith in response to protests; in 2015 activists called for the defunding of Wesleyan’s newspaper, the Argus, after it published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement; and in 2016, The New Yorker published an in-depth report on activism at Oberlin, which included an interview with a student who wanted trigger warnings on “Antigone” because its protagonist’s intention of suicide.

So what do you guys think? Is UChicago’s action warranted?

Immediate reactions for and against

Nicole: If UChicago is trying to get rid of the Tumblr idea of all this, that’s good. Being challenged and forced to think about things that make you uncomfortable or you haven’t been exposed to is good.

Of course, there’s right and wrong ways of doing it. The idea, though, that you should get out of assignments or classes because you say it’s personally uncomfortable is asinine.

Serena: “Asinine” is such an awesome word! The UChicago trigger warning conversation has been all over my Facebook feed, as it’s my alma mater. I love what my friend Molly Liu wrote to the administration, excerpt below:

“Academic freedom means that students from all backgrounds are free to explore ideas, no matter how controversial. Academic freedom is aided by certain conditions: ground rules of engagement, classes and teachers who guide students through topics, and a diverse student body that can bring multitudes of experiences to the discussion […].

“[…] Trigger warnings and safe spaces are essential to academic freedom because they promote engagement with potentially retraumatizing material. For those who have experienced trauma, like myself, trigger warnings and safe spaces allow us come to the classroom prepared to engage, instead of being blindsided by an unexpected flashback. For those who have not experienced trauma, they signify that a concept that seems an abstraction is actually grounded in painful, lived experience, deepening a student’s engagement. For example, putting “warning: rape of a child” over Lolita enables an unaware student to see through the narrator’s filigreed prose to the book’s emotional core of abuse. Ensuring that a classroom discussion of police brutality is a safe space can allow a black student to speak about their experience being racially profiled by the UCPD [University of Chicago Police Department] without fear of retaliation. By foregrounding traumatized and marginal voices, trigger warnings allow us to make explicit and thus counteract the power dynamics in society that usually silence those voices.

“I’m saddened that the University continues to view lived trauma as antithetical to intellectual activity. I believe that the student body and the administration are engaged in the same project: to let knowledge grow from more to more, and so be human life enriched. We all benefit when all of us can contribute our experiences to that knowledge.”

Shruti: I didn’t do my undergrad in a US university and here in the UK I have yet to encounter trigger warnings or even safe spaces, maybe because Brits communicate by trading insults, or so it seems. However I saw this article detailing how trigger warnings and safe spaces have been misused in colleges. It’s a long read but details how they might impede freedom of speech on campus and do harm:

Having said that, I find the letter from UChicago unbalanced and reactionary.

I can understand undergrads behaving childishly. A university responding in the same tone, confounding a concept with its misuse (the article I shared is also guilty of this, although it is otherwise balanced) and scrapping it without considering potential benefits for those who might need it most, is disappointing.

A safe space for those with or without power?

Joy: Ah, the latest volley in the seriously misguided battle over “free speech” and “safe space” in American universities. Hell yeah I got thoughts on this!

The first thing we need to do is to define our terms. What do we mean by “safety,” and safety for whom? What do we mean by the “free” in “free speech,” for whom, and what does this look like in an institutional context like the university? There is a false dichotomy being created between “safe space” and a “questioning [that] sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.”

To my mind, the term “safe space” is the problem. What I want is an unsafe space for those in power, such as the University of Chicago administrators who penned that letter and are institutionally protected and usually not forced into discomfort or inconvenience, or into actually trying to understand what the opposition is articulating.

What I want is a safe-er space for those who are usually unsafe in the institutional default of the university. Instead of, as the Atlantic article, asking the “effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves” we should be addressing the effects of institutional protections on the administrators who very clearly have not been forced to authentically engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable.

Because no one’s saying (except the extreme or somewhat immature) that we should avoid ideas that make us uncomfortable. Just don’t hide behind faux universal principles such as “free speech” to pretend that institutional power imbalances and histories of violence don’t exist, applied in very different ways to those who are more or less structurally vulnerable.

The rhetoric is getting out of control

Nicole: In complete honesty, how much time have any of you spent on Tumblr? I’m genuinely curious because I think it’s that attitude that they’re trying to fight against. I definitely agree it’s a bit premature and reactionary, but you also have to remember that it only takes one person to ruin it for everyone else.

Example: There’s a picture of a lynching in my political science textbook. Does that make me horribly uncomfortable? Absolutely. So, I look harder. The easy option of being able to look away needs to be taken away in a lot of circumstances.

If that’s what UChicago was trying to say, then I applaud them. I have zero doubts that there are probably quite a few college students out there right now who think they should never have to look because I’ve dealt with them. Is it as widespread as these guys seem to think? No, but it is there.

Respect of others should be expected in classes by students, faculty, staff, and admin. Student and admin interaction is very slim, so I think this was more of the admin trying to say they’re going to back up the faculty, or at least I hope that’s what the poor attempt was at.

I also agree that we need to define our terms, which is something that is difficult to do now that this is out in the “spotlight.”

IMO, we need to tone it down, stop using moralistic language, and say what we mean. If that cannot be summed up in a simple phrase, so be it.

Jia Jia: I’m with Nicole on the need for simplicity and toning down. I think the letter is referring to the hyperbolic application of concepts like trigger warning and safe space to situations where neither are warranted. I don’t see it as the result of an institution clamping down on students who challenge its power. Ironically though, the way in which the university has reacted—through an edict in a letter as opposed to, let’s say, a conversation with students during orientation—is classically authoritarian and shows that the administration is neither very savvy in PR nor human psychology.

For me, I find trigger warnings tricky if they get too specific. Warning: violence and sexual content pretty much gives me the alarm bells that I need. Any greater specificity and the word choice takes on a political and moral overtone that begins to color my reading of a particular text.

Take the example of Lolita that was previously mentioned. While it’s true that the content includes the (repeated) rape of a child, that’s not all that the book is about. The book digs into some very uncomfortable nooks of desire and arrogance, and its beautiful language has a disturbing ability to seduce the reader and make us complicit in acts that we should find repulsive. If someone introduced the book to me in terms of, “you might find this disturbing because it contains the rape of a child,” I’d be reading everything in terms of rape and miss the more insidious effects of the book. If professors give general warning and let students know that they can opt out or follow up with questions about specifics, that would create a safe space that’s still intellectually wide open.

False narratives around free speech and coddled Millennials don’t help

Ming: One of my biggest frustrations with the whole debate is that protest is speech. It has traditionally been a very important and powerful form of speech. Telling students they cannot protest certain forms of institutional speech (i.e. choosing a certain speaker, mandating a certain reading list) is simply choosing one form of speech over another.

Admittedly, that is something a school is allowed to do, but don’t do it in the name of “free speech”! Also the First Amendment already has its own balancing test—you weigh the value of the speech against the cost. I feel like universities could easily adopt a similar standard as opposed to having a blanket rule that is sure to offend. My understanding is that most students who request trigger warnings simply want their concerns to be taken into consideration.

The coddling narrative is also frustrating because we simply have no data about which students are requesting trigger warnings (though we have some guesses). If the majority of the safe space advocates are boys from Westchester who have been the product of helicopter parenting, then maybe we can start freaking out about the fragility of the American psyche. But if the requests are coming from people who have been traditionally excluded from higher education until the last few decades, then it just makes total sense. Many courses at universities have been designed with the straight white male in mind, not necessarily consciously or maliciously, but just by default. It cannot come as a surprise that it would (and probably should) change as the demographics of the student body shifts dramatically. And to echo Joy’s point (“Because no one’s saying (except the extreme or somewhat immature) that we should avoid ideas that make us uncomfortable. Just don’t hide behind faux universal principles such as “free speech” to pretend that institutional power imbalances and histories of violence don’t exist and are applied in very different ways to those who are more or less structurally vulnerable.”), I think much of this will eventually be resolved by including more diverse voices in the faculty and the curricula.

Finally, I agree with Shruti and Jia Jia that it’s strange for a university to have such an alarmist and unsavvy reaction to a request from students. Students are young and impressionable and easily carried away by ideas, but they also stand on the right side of many civil rights issues in history. It seems bizarre for a school (presumably run be rational adults) not to encourage a conversation about issues that are clearly important to at least a significant minority of its students.

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Look out for part 2 in the upcoming weeks, which centers on our discussion  Lionel Shriver’s speech criticism of the concept of cultural appropriation.