U of C Faculty Defends Safe Spaces, Blasts Dean in Letter to Students

CHICAGO, IL - Faculty at the University of Chicago have responded, fiercely, to a dean’s welcome letter opposed to safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Last month, Dean Jay Ellison penned a letter to incoming freshmen at the Hyde Park campus and promoted an open discourse of political and social ideas, warning the first-year college students that the university would not provide “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces.”

But faculty vehemently disagreed in a letter of their own published in the Chicago Maroon, a University publication.

Signed by more than 100 faculty members of the University, the letter immediately touched on the purpose of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

“...Such requests often touch on substantive, ongoing issues of bias, intolerance, and trauma that affect our intellectual exchanges. To start a conversation by declaring that such requests are not worth making is an affront to the basic principles of liberal education and participatory democracy.”

Related on Patch: 'Safe Spaces' and 'Trigger Warnings' Out at the University of Chicago

The letter noted that many of the professors who signed the letter disagreed about the full role of trigger warnings and safe spaces, but all agreed on the above line.

“The history of ‘safe spaces’ goes back to gay, civil rights, and feminist efforts of the mid–20th century to create places protected from quite real forces of violence and intimidation. They also served as incubators of new ideas away from the censure of the very authorities threatened by these movements. It would be naïve to think that the University of Chicago is immune from social problems.”

The faculty members who signed the letter were in turn blasted in the comments section by those defending Ellison.

“You do realize the harassment and threats that you claim to deplore are coming from the very same students who are demanding safe spaces, right?” one wrote.

Read the full letter via the Chicago Maroon