U of Chicago: No safe spaces, ‘trigger warnings’

Students at the University of Chicago have been warned not to expect safe spaces or trigger warnings in the wake of several disrupted events at the institution at the hands of protesters.

At the University of Chicago – a private research university with more than 5,800 undergrads and almost 10,000 graduate students – calls for space spaces interrupted or shut down several high-profile speakers earlier in 2016, according to The Chicago Maroon, the campus newspaper.

“We do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces'”. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others.

Many on social media applauded the University of Chicago for its stance. Only about 8% of the more than 31,000 people who applied to enter the class of 2020 were accepted by the school.

Harper Library at the University of Chicago. A survey found that only 17 percent of college educators report favorable views of trigger warnings, while 15 percent said students had requested them in their courses, according to the Chicago Tribune. In order to protect the diversity on campus, some words and expressions must be forbidden, and ideas which might cause harm should not be uttered in “safe spaces”. Earlier this month, DePaul University denied a request for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak on campus after protests forced the cancellation of a speech by conservative blogger Milo Yiannopoulos there last May. It includes a quote from one of the university’s former presidents, Hanna Holborn Gray, who said that “education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think“.

“Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom”, she stated.