Safety, Dignity, and the Quest for a Democratic Campus Culture

Abstract

In his excellent paper, Callan (2016) differentiates intellectual safety, which fosters smugness, indifference and lack of effort, from dignity safety, which is needed for participation, learning and engagement. He suggests that college classrooms that reject the first and espouse the second would be ones that focus on "cultivating open-mindedness in a context of disagreement and fostering the civility that would secure dignity safety for all" (p. 75). This is an important goal, and Callan makes here a significant contribution to the current discussion-both scholarly and public-on free speech, academic freedom and dignity safety. In what follows, I (1) expand on the suggestion that dignity safety is a threshold condition, contextualizing its role in providing access and on its place in the continuum of safety requirements, (2) consider the overlaps between dignity safety and intellectual safety, and subsequently reject nobility as an appropriate basis for creating a democratic atmosphere, and (3) suggest a democratic alternative to nobility and (Callan's version of) civility for the advancement of a democratic campus culture.