By Rahul Tamta
Opinions Editor
Graphic by Ana Bicolli

In their welcome letter to incoming freshmen, the University of Chicago took an unconventional approach, to say the least. They sent students a blunt message detailing what they should expect on campus.

“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,” John Ellison, Dean of Students, wrote to members of the class of 2020.

This direct condemnation of college campus anti-intellectualism drew thousands of upset and impassioned responses. Many felt that the university had taken a rash and dangerous course of action. Their argument rested on the idea that safe spaces and trigger warnings are essential to a healthy college campus environment.

This sentiment is far from baseless. The likes of safe spaces and trigger warnings were conceived for inherently moralistic reasons. Safe spaces were created so that individuals who had been victims of marginalization and/or mental, physical, or emotional trauma could come together for communication free from potentially dangerous perspectives. Likewise, trigger warnings were created to preface material that could be potentially distressing for victims of traumatic experiences.

When looking solely at the dictionary definitions of these entities, the University’s letter is puzzling. That being said, when one looks at how safe spaces and trigger warnings are currently being put into practice, the University’s position becomes more justifiable. The fact of the matter is that the likes of safe spaces and trigger warnings, while created for good reasons, are being abused across the nation on college campuses. Anti-intellectualism runs rampant on these campuses. The culture of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions, while valuable in some cases, often aid this regressive phenomena.

After conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos gave a speech critiquing 3rd wave feminism at the University of Pittsburgh, several students reacted in shock and horror. Simply because Yiannopoulos expressed unpopular (but not dangerous or violent by any stretch of the imagination) viewpoints, many students attested to feeling “traumatized,” “in physical danger,” and in need of safe spaces. Before his speech, trigger warnings were deemed necessary simply because Yiannopoulos called into question the accuracy of misconstrued but popular statistics, such as the wage gap. Yiannopoulos has gotten similar responses from students at the several college campuses that he has visited to give scheduled talks at.

Other conservative pundits have faced similar negative responses. When Ben Shapiro was scheduled to speak at California State University, Los Angeles in 2016, he was met with students blocking entrances, setting off fire alarms, and engaging in violent conduct in a collective effort to have him not speak because they found his rhetoric too incendiary. Shapiro was also banned from speaking at DePaul University, once again because he expressed unpopular viewpoints.

In early April, conservative students at DePaul chalked the school’s sidewalk, scrawling their candidate’s name and phrases like, “Don’t Feel the Bern.” By morning, the university was forced to wash away the chalk because students overwhelmingly deemed the word “Trump” to be a trigger.

During the 2014–15 school year, the deans and department chairs at the ten University of California system schools were presented by administrators with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive and potentially triggering statements included “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

In December of 2015, professor of law at Harvard University Jeannie Suk wrote an article for The New Yorker about law students asking professors at Harvard not to teach rape law. In one case, they even protested using the word “violate” lest it triggers students.

There are a plethora of further examples across colleges in the U.S. that generally follow this theme. Students are abusing safe spaces and trigger warnings to aid their cognitive dissonance. Institutions of learning are on a dangerous path of becoming places where students no longer want exposure to speech that challenges their worldview—they want freedom from speech that doesn’t conform to their ideologies.

There is no denying that there are legitimate reasons to have safe spaces and trigger warnings on college campuses. That being said, the current manifestation of these entities make them harmful to a freethinking learning environment. There are obvious drawbacks to the University of Chicago’s decision to blanketly condemn safe spaces and trigger warnings, but it is undeniably a decision in the direction of preserving open discourse and intellectual debate. There is a simple way to curtail the potential repercussions of this course of action: if you are a student who has gone through life experiences justifying the need for safe spaces and trigger warnings, attend a different university.