Egalitarianism, Safety, and Virtue in Education: A Response to Callan

Abstract

So here we are: two more white cis-hetero male academics discussing the practice of " safe space. " Is this practice necessary, we ask, to eradicate the academy's long-standing exclusion and domination of people deemed different from us, or does it constitute an unacceptable attack on academic freedom and the right to free speech? Eamonn Callan opens his essay " Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces " (2016) by briefly contrasting the arguments of each side before leading us on a search for middle ground between them. But I see much more truth in the first than in the second, and irony in the fact that we philosophize from our comfortable seats at the intersection of " ascribed privilege of certain kinds " (p. 64) on the efforts of the oppressed to liberate themselves from the very same systems of oppression that offer us such privilege. 1 Before directly addressing some of Callan's points, I think it might be helpful to do the same justice to the history of safe space that Callan does to that of the Western conception of human dignity. Bell (2015) traces the origins of safe space to group psychotherapy and the sensitivity training that social psychologist Kurt Lewin introduced to corporate America for leadership building in the 1940s. Two decades later, humanistic therapist Carl Rogers " developed the idea into encounter groups which were more aimed at self-actualisation and social change " (Bell, 2015, para. 12). 2 It was around this time that the concept of safe space appeared in the women's movement, claims Kenney (2001), where it was distinguished from therapy in that it was used with the aim of analyzing and changing women's social conditions rather than individual women themselves. It was not so much an end as it was a means, and not so much a physical space as one " created by the coming together of women searching for community " (p. 24). Also, while it failed to provide refuge from violence and harassment from police or others, it " [implied] a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resistance " (p. 24). In short, safe space, which had previously been a corporate tool for self-improvement, became by the end of the 1960s an activist tool for social justice. From the women's movement, the concept of safe space became central to the development of the lesbian movement, and subsequently the gay one. Hanhardt (2013) describes how the queer community in New York and San Francisco began organizing and agitating for such space after the 1969 Stonewall 1 Freire (1970/1996) might add that the oppressed aim to free not only themselves, but also their oppressors, by destroying systems of oppression that dehumanize all involved. A quote variously attributed to Booker T. Washington expresses a similar sentiment: " You can't hold a man [sic] down without staying down with him. " 2 Rogers is also noteworthy for his " person-centred " approach, which would inspire the " student-centred " credo that is, much like " safe space, " today so carelessly thrown around as a hollow buzzword in many educational circles.