Creating Campus “Safe Spaces” For Real
I recently returned from a 10-day camping trip in the California High Sierras where, in addition to relaxing and breathing in fresh pine-scented air, I met several very friendly Trump supporters, one of whom asked me if I was allowed to have free speech in my new hometown of Berkeley, CA.
I was taken aback by such an absurd question - shamelessly posed to me as I awkwardly hooked up water to my camper van. It became evident rather quickly that “John,” a dog-friendly Fox News consumer in his 60’s, was an enthusiastic fan of Ann Coulter, who for months now has been manipulatively arguing conservative ideas are not “safe” in the home of the free speech movement.
The coverage John watched of the Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter speaking engagement fiascos painted both incendiary ideologues as victims of political correctness spun completely out-of-control. Fringe rioters unaffiliated with UC Berkeley or the city of Berkeley descended on campus and a city park via buses and trains on the days they were scheduled to speak. So, obviously, if outsiders flash mob Berkeley, our best and brightest kids these days and our progressive cities are close-minded and alarmingly fragile.
As anyone living in Berkeley knows, Yiannopoulos, Coulter, and the conservative media failed to report to the less shockingly obnoxious conservative speakers who are routinely hosted as speakers at UC Berkeley. They also consistently downplayed the very expensive law enforcement and security resources allocated to protect their free speech as credible threats were made against the campus community related to their speaking engagements.
In the case of Ann Coulter, the financially stressed UC Berkeley, with a budget deficit of $110 million, spent well into the six figures on security the day she pulled out of her speaking engagement. School administrators funded a massive show of force from hundreds of campus, city, and state police. Helicopters whirled overhead; barricades, police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances were staged across campus; security checkpoints were enforced as students and faculty presented their IDs multiple times to get to class; and armed guards were posted outside doors to classrooms and lecture halls to protect the safety of professors and students. Simultaneously, no-show perpetual victim Ann Coulter complained on cable news the premier public university in the country was too fragile to hear what she had to say.
While far-right conservatives complain that their “free speech” is being threatened, those closely monitoring the situation are concluding that “free speech” is a ruse. What hard right shock jock celebrity conservatives like Coulter and Yanninopolis really want are opportunities to incite and stage newsworthy violent protests.
While Black Lives Matter and other progressive activists stage disruptive non-violent actions, Coulter and her ilk present them as anarchists who are anti-police and law enforcement. Simultaneously, she openly called upon violent “free speech” Trump supporters to descend on Berkeley to protect her free speech, which is already protected.
This falls comfortably within a conservative pattern of projection and paranoia. Conservatives accuse liberals of committing offenses they are actively engaged in. In actuality, free speech is not permitted at conservative Christian colleges and universities, where students are sequestered and spoon fed doctrinaire theology and ideology. Liberal Christian and non-Christian students are not accepted for admission to Christian schools as the application procedures explicitly underscore. Further, enrolled students are expelled when they oppose doctrine or violate lifestyle statements.
It should come as no surprise Coulter cancelled her event once she realized UC Berkeley was serious about providing a secure venue and robust campus security during her talk. It wasn’t worth her time. Tear gas, fire bombs, black masks, dark hoodies, shouting, shoving, punching, and kicking make great video to run on a loop. Without it, Ann Coulter speaking at UC Berkeley is not news. Her shallow brand of insult politics is basically irrelevant at elite academic institutions - attendance would have been pitiful no matter what date, time, and place she was given.
Staged riots got her in front of the camera painting Berkeley as a community of violent cry-baby politically correct “liberal snowflakes” who demand protection from emotionally triggering speech. It advanced her ridiculous narrative that UC Berkeley, known for its’ pivotal role in the free speech movement, is systemically intolerant, close-minded, discriminatory, and oppressive towards conservative speakers.
Faced with this onslaught of obnoxious, entitled, and unfounded critique; chancellor Dirk wrote to the campus community:
This is a university, not a battlefield. We must make every effort to hold events at a time and location that maximizes the chances that First Amendment rights can be successfully exercised and that community members can be protected. While our commitment to freedom of speech and expression remains absolute, we have an obligation to heed our police department’s assessment of how best to hold safe and successful events.
In relation to the invitation made by a student group for Ann Coulter to speak at Berkeley this week, we have therefore to take seriously the intelligence UCPD has regarding threats of violence that could endanger our students, our community, and perhaps even Ms. Coulter herself. It is specific, significant and real. Yet, despite those threats, we have — and will remain — ready to welcome her to campus, and assume the risks, challenges and expenses that will attend her visit. That is demanded by our commitment to Free Speech. What we will not do is allow our students, other members of the campus community, and the public to be needlessly endangered by permitting an event to be held in a venue that our police force does not believe to be protectable. If UCPD believes there is a significant security threat attendant to a particular event, we cannot allow it to be held in a venue with a limited number of exits; in a hall that cannot be cordoned off; in an auditorium with floor to ceiling glass; in any space that does not meet basic safety criteria established by UCPD. This is the sole reason we could not accommodate Ms. Coulter on April 27th, and the very reason we offered her alternative dates in early May and September, when venues that satisfy safety requirements are available.
UC Berkeley offered Coulter a secure venue at a reasonable date and time and she cancelled her engagement. Technically, the student group sponsoring her cancelled, but in reality she was looking for an opportunity to capitalize on the uproar caused by the rioting associated with the Yiannopoulos debacle and concluded she would get more attention by inciting violent protests, which she did. True to form, she offered this epically rude statement, “I’m so sorry Berkeley canceled my speech. I’m so sorry YAF acquiesced in the cancellation. And I’m so sorry for free speech crushed by thugs. It’s sickening when a radical thuggish institution like Berkeley can so easily snuff out the cherished American right to free speech.”
UC Berkeley students, who have more pressing things to do than listen to Ann Coulter, are hard core radical thug enemies of free speech? Shocking that a woman so hostile to the university community couldn’t drum up an audience on substance alone.
So what really is going on? If the question is, are conservative ideas “safe” in Berkeley? No, they are not. No ideas are “safe” in Berkeley. As in any serious intellectual environment opposed to ideological authoritarianism, all ideas, academic arguments, and information presented as “fact” are subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Medically flaky liberal quackery, hard right hate speech, and half-baked artistic expressions are routinely eviscerated.
Yes, in Berkeley, anyone can freely speak their mind. No, in Berkeley, no one can reasonably expect their truth claims to be accepted at face value, “safe” from vigorous critique and review.
And herein lies the real rub. Conservative students are often poorly prepared to defend their ideas. Conservatives in this era are trained to tolerate intolerance, advance prejudice, promote ignorance, and accept “alternative facts” and faith-based opinions as valid “truths,” especially with regard to their objectively harmful positions on abortion, homosexuality, evolution, race, and non-Christian religion.
Christian conservatives routinely extrapolate personal experiences and anecdotes to describe reality for all people. For example, anti-choice activists assert that because some girls and women are traumatized by abortion, all girls and women are traumatized by abortion whether they know it or not. Widely celebrated Christian Ex-homosexuals on the Christian college lecture circuit argue subject matter experts on homosexuality are “ignorant” because they conclude that homosexuality, while on a spectrum, is not a pathological condition that needs a cure. These anti-intellectual tactics are particularly commonplace in religiously conservative and fundamentalist schools, churches, and homes where children are taught from an early age that it is existentially dangerous to question religious authority.
Students expected to lead the religious right’s agenda against modernity are trained to develop advanced academic skills while strictly guided away from inquiries into the foundations of their faith. Christopher Stroop has written poignantly and earnestly about his profound existential distress as an intellectually curious scholar and queer man raised and educated in a conservative evangelical community. As he and other “exvangelicals” have exposed, critical thinking is not a “safe” endeavor for students raised in religiously fundamentalist homes. They are counseled repeatedly, on no uncertain terms, they risk social exile, economic fragility, and even eternal damnation if they question their faith or walk away from it all together.
The Christian right has carefully constructed parallel colleges, universities, publishing houses, media conglomerates, health care providers, insurance companies, business networks, and counselling organizations committed to opposing civil rights for gender and sexual minorities and reproductive rights for women. Anyone in this world who uses their “free speech” to declare their support for gay marriage or abortion rights finds themselves facing an avalanche of rejection.
The Gospel writer Luke quoted Jesus saying:
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Christian conservatives today “carry the cross” by severely sanctioning those who announce their descision to adopt humane and scientifically literate positions. By definition, an unequivocally non-sectarian, pluralistic, intellectually rigorous environment like the UC Berkeley is not a “safe” place for inhumane religious fundamentalist ideas.
On non-sectarian credentialed campuses, conservative religious students encounter staff, faculty, and peers who are openly opposed to their ideas and unimpressed by their beliefs. Many staff, student, and faculty members have no patience for anti-choice, misogynist, sexist, racist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-equality, homophobic, transphobic, science-denying, faith-based reasoning. Non-religious members of the academic community fairly and reasonably view alternative faith-based “facts” as hostile to their freedom, autonomy, safety, health, and well-being.
Short of carrying a gun with them at all times they are not intoxicated, how can religiously conservative students feel “safe” in a pluralistic, diverse, rigorously intellectual environment? The short answer is, they can’t. Their ideas will always be challenged and critiqued vigorously, which they experience as existentially threatening. There is no such thing as a “faith card” they can drop on the table and expect their professors and peers to give them a pass for sloppy reasoning.
This leaves students educated in conservative religious environments between a Biblically established rock and a hard place. They have been sternly taught quoting “inerrant” Bible passages it is not their relationship with Jesus or their love for humanity that will save them from eternal damnation, but their rigid adherence to inhumane, scientifically illiterate beliefs. If they truly make an effort to learn, they risk exile from their family, friends, and community. If they become more deeply entrenched in fundamentalism, they deprive themselves of a true education.
Making this all the more challenging are legitimately grieving liberal staff, students, and faculty are fighting back against an ascendant religiously based Trump administration and GOP establishment, often harshly, sometimes cruelly. Lashing out against conservative students can tragically compound the psychic harm already inflicted by authoritarian conservative religious institutions and family members. Conservative students are being bullied, first and foremost at home, and also, all too often, at school. How can conservative students on campus become safer from vitriol from distressed liberal peers?
In the 1960's, student civil rights activists attended Citizenship Schools and the skills they learned there are just as relevant today. At that time, blacks in the South were an oppressed minority, discriminated against based on the color of their skin, not the content of their character. Students were taught (life-saving) non-violent resistance tactics to employ when enduring physical and emotional violence. They learned to perceive racists as victims of ignorance and adopt a role as educators. They understood the vital importance of dismantling laws and practices undergirding systemic racism. They embraced the principles of American democracy and responded civilly to incivility.
To this day, black leaders, organizations and institutions provide Americans with the most robust body of knowledge and tactics to truly make America great. Non-sectarian schools would be wise to revisit the Citizenship School curriculum. No one benefits when conservative students raised in psychologically and spiritually abusive homes are met with cruelty from their liberal peers. The rare person who leaves fundamentalism and conservative extremism endures an excrutiatingly painful, laborious, and lengthy journey. Campus liberals would be wise to employ generous patience and steadfast kindness towards student antagonists. As Dr. King famously preached, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
In a free, fair, and open society, information presented as fact should always be open to scrutiny. Political agendas that objectively cause harm should always be questioned. Dialogue and debate should always be encouraged and violent protest always thwarted. Those principles form the foundation for genuine health, safety, and security.
My tense and aggravating campsite conversation with John about Ann Coulter, political correctness, fact-checking (“it’s hard to know who to trust anymore”), American rape culture, the confederate flag, (“what about?”) lakes named after Native American tyrants, and laws regarding slavery came to an abrupt ending when my husband and two dogs arrived for the weekend. The following day, without comment, I exercised my right to free speech by applying a “Black Lives Matter” bumper sticker to the window of our camper van facing John’s campsite. As we left for Yosemite, John and I said pleasant good-byes. I doubt he’ll be visiting Berkeley any time soon.
Sarah Woods is a feminist scholar, theologian, chaplain, and previously ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Masters of Divinity from Howard University.
