The Avenging Sword of Safe Space

It’s a phrase commonly used by lawyers, but often confusing to others.  It’s that the thing at issue “can be used as a sword as well as a shield.”  What it means is that the thing not only protects someone or some group, but, if deftly handled, can also be used to attack them or another.  But “safe space,” the land of puppies and Play-Doh?

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf makes the case.

At Ohio State last week, a sit-in and protest inside a university building was cut short when students were warned that they would be forcibly removed by police, arrested, and possibly expelled if they did not vacate the premises within a few hours, by 5 a.m.

Weird, right? As opposed to protests and sit-ins that once brought pepper spray, today they bring Happy Meals delivered by deans with love.  But not this time. After the requisite Gertruding, Conor highlights what makes this unusual.

The first is the manner adopted by the main messenger, which is a common one for real-world authority figures—he is respectful, blunt, and not particularly apologetic or deferential—but I do not recall seeing other college administrators adopt it.

As dictated to me by [university president] Dr. Drake 15 minutes ago to me on the phone, we have chosen to try to work with you this evening because we respect you. This is your university.

And we want to have dialogue. We want the dialogue to extend beyond tonight. But if you refuse to leave, then you will be charged with a student code of conduct violation. And I’m telling you this now because I want you to have good thought and careful consideration.

This is what counts for blunt these days. What Conor means by “respectful” is a mystery to me, as it strikes me as remarkably “respectful” when a cop doesn’t use the word “fuck” as he beats someone with his baton while screaming, “stop resisting.”  But then, I’m an old, out-of-touch white guy who doesn’t believe a grown-up’s tongue must necessarily come in contact with other people’s kids’ tushies.

But then, the university’s unnamed messenger drops the hammer:

Our goal, because I want you to understand why we would do something like this—I didn’t think we were going to—but the consensus of university leaders is that the people who work in this building should be protected also.

They come to work around 7 o’clock. Do you remember when you all made the rush down there and chanted to the folks outside the doors a minute ago?

That scared people.

Oh snap.  If you’re unattuned to the wily ways of the young, you might not catch the import of this, but Conor did.

He accuses the students of denying a safe space to the workers in the building!

Scaring people. That’s an evil, a wrong, beyond all acceptable harms. It’s the harm students embrace to justify all manner of demands, their cries of pain and anguish, because chalk writings of words that hurt their feelings make them scared. And when someone is scared, are they not entitled to their “safe space”?

Of course they are. That’s the new rule. That’s the rule students demand for themselves. And here, it’s turned against them, that these students have scared The Ohio State’s employees, and by doing so, deprived them of their safe space.

That elicited disbelief from protesters. Who was scared, they scoffed, the police officers with guns?

Heh. Welcome to the old, out-of-touch guy’s world, kids. You don’t believe?  Guess what, neither do we. You’re scared by the word “Trump” written in chalk? Turnabout is fair play.

Said messenger two, “That’s the truth you guys. I talked to several of them when they walked out of here.” Their consensus position: “The people in this building have a right to a safe environment, and to an environment where their jobs won’t be interrupted.”

When rights are invented ad hoc by those claiming that their feelings entitled them to, well, whatever they want to be entitled to, why are your “student” rights more worthy of a “safe environment” than their employee rights?  Why is your absurd and infantile fear any more scary than theirs?

Conor calls bullshit on the college’s assertion of safe space as a rationale for ousting the protesters.

In cases like this one, it won’t matter that one of the least scary experiences in the world is walking into a university administration building at 7 a.m., well-rested and ready for work, to be greeted by a bunch of exhausted 18-year-old OSU students groggily looking up from the corner where they curled up with college hoodies as pillows. After years of reporting on occupations like this one, I’ve never heard of even one case of a college staff member of administrator coming away with even a scratch. Yet in the name of preserving “safe space,” these protesters were evicted.

And indeed, the claim by The Ohio State’s messenger is nonsensical. That one can claim to be afraid is facile. Some people are scared by spiders and snakes. Some are scared by students. Some might not be scared at all, but it makes for a great excuse to toss protestors from a building.  Maybe Conor’s seeming acceptance of the veracity of the claim is a bit naïve, even though the messenger said, “That’s the truth you guys.” Sometimes, people say it’s the truth when, well, it’s not. I know, but it happens.

Where sensitivity to harm and subjective discomfort are king, and denying someone “a safe space” is verboten, folks standing in groups, confrontationally shouting out demands, will not fare well. When convenient, administrators will declare them scary and unfit for the safe space, exploiting how verboten it is to challenge anyone who says they feel afraid.

And so, finally, the worm has turned, and the “right” to a “safe space” is being used to break up a protest, to end students assemblage to make demands for a safe space of their very own.  You have to give The Ohio State credit for coming up with a way to flip the students’ demands back at them.

Of course, it’s all total nonsense, but then, so too are the students’ complaints that they are grievously harmed by systemic microaggressions. That nonsense begets nonsense reveals the absurdity of the demands in the first place. And now that the “safe space” nonsense is being used as a sword against the students, as well as a shield for students to protect themselves from the harsh world of reality, perhaps it will dawn on all players that this stupidity has to come to an end.

And hopefully, this realization will happen before the cops realize that they can start screaming “you invaded my safe space” as they beat the crap out of black guys with their chalk-like batons.  Because if the stupid doesn’t end, even the cops will figure out how to use it as a sword.

 

6 thoughts on “The Avenging Sword of Safe Space

  1. wilbur

    I love “That’s the truth you guys”.

    Instead of a sit-in in the administration building (such a cliche), they should enter a righteous float in the Columbus Day parade. Then bust out of it and go crazy like Bluto.

    Except none of them knows how to weld.

  2. Keith

    A whole room of people angered about “microaggressions” and not a peep when an an administrator says they’ll be put into “paddy-wagons”?!?

    Guess NINA to BLM.

  3. delurking

    The evolution of Poe. Victimhood culture is now harder to parody than religious or political extremism.

  4. Jeffrey L. Boyer

    Do ‘they’ no longer teach that old gem: “Careful what you wish for…”

    Of course as has been pointed out many times here, many laws come to be, contrary to that sage advice. Never learn, and all that.

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