I’m a Conservative Professor Who Opposed Safe Spaces. I Was Wrong.
New York Times | Jon A. Shields
Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, argues that “the debate we should be having is not one that pits free expression against safe spaces. The real question is how to design safe spaces that aid the goals of liberal education.”
Envisioning classrooms as safe spaces where all viewpoints can be expressed “safely,” without fear of retribution, Shields reframes the debate around safe spaces from a free speech lens.
“I have to confess that in asking students to maintain our classroom as a place of private deliberation I am asking them to keep quiet — and all in the name of open and free expression.”
What Shield ultimately developed was a set of norms for his classroom— “social norms necessary to facilitate and regulate the collective search for truth.” These include encouraging students to assume their peers are making arguments in good faith and creating a climate in which students exercise “voluntary restraint” to “actually widen spaces for the discussion of ideas by softening the climate of fear on our campuses.”
