By Jessica Hurley
This fall, Applied Mechanics and I have been immersed in the world of college education. At the University of the Chicago and the University of the Arts, we have worked closely with students as they have tackled questions of history and violence, protest and the purpose of art. Our students, in their first-ever college classes or making their first forays into devised theater, have pushed themselves far beyond their limits. They have asked hard questions; they have committed their full selves to sitting with the difficulty of those questions. They have questioned their own positions in the world, and together they have inhabited the impossibility of reckoning with the world’s violence and the necessity of doing so anyway.
This fall, our students had their ability to learn foreclosed by the threat of gun violence. The University of Chicago cancelled a day of classes last week after an online post threatened to attack the campus with automatic weapons. Back in October, students and instructors at the University of the Arts had to make their own decisions whether to attend class in the face of a shooting threat to an unspecified Philadelphia-area university.
This is not a safe space.
The experience of working with students as their (and, indeed, our) safety has been directly threatened has cast into stark relief the conversation around trigger warnings and safe spaces that has been circulating in the press for the past several years. Emerging from campaigns by queer and feminist students and students of color, the idea of the trigger warning is that teachers and journalists should flag when upcoming content may traumatize or retraumatize students and readers who have been victims of violence. For students who have been raped, for example, being exposed without warning to graphic scenes of sexual violence often triggers post-traumatic symptoms including flashbacks, panic attacks, or dissociation. This is not only a health concern but a pedagogical one; students who are experiencing panic attacks because their teacher thinks that they should “man up” or because their classmates make callous reference to sexual violence class cannot learn.
The related idea of a classroom or university as a safe space requires that teachers and administrators be attentive to not traumatizing or retraumatizing their most vulnerable students: that racist language and practices be considered unacceptable, for example, or that teachers should warn their students about disturbing content so that they can figure out how to approach the material in a way that protects them from harm. A safe space is an environment that tries to ensure equal access to learning to all of its participants, to people of all ages and backgrounds who have taken on significant debt to come to this place and engage with new ideas and skills.
The blowback against trigger warnings and safe spaces was, I suppose, predictable. Students are accused of wanting to be coddled, protected from the difficulties of the real world, wanting to shut down free speech and academic debate. The right of frat boys to hold parties in blackface is rendered a sacrosanct expression of free speech; the right of traumatized students to figure out how to approach texts that might retraumatize them is no right at all. Our students are expected to be invulnerable, bulletproof, as if learning happens best in a Teflon space where nothing sticks, nothing penetrates, nothing
shatters.
This is not a safe space.
My students are not bulletproof. I see them now in the crosshairs. We all, teachers and students alike, learn at gunpoint. While my students discuss structures of power and violence in The Metamorphoses of Ovid, I do a quick headcount and determine which of them should leave through which exit in an active shooter situation. I think how vulnerable they are, these seventeen and eighteen-year-olds in my classroom. I, professional wielder of words, wonder what words would turn the shooter from the classroom door, or if I would, could, offer up my own dumb body instead. Like this, at gunpoint, we teach and learn.
Life in the crosshairs, even so, is not a new condition for many of my students but an intensification of the exposure to violence with which they have lived their whole lives. My African-American students live in fear of the police. Statistically, one in three of my female students will be assaulted during their time at college. Like this, in the crosshairs, we teach and learn.
This is not a safe space.
I ask my students to bring everything they have into the classroom. Intellect, desire, personal history, dreams for the future: they will, I believe, learn more and better if they can read Ovid or recreate the Detroit uprising with their full selves. My classroom therefore has to be a safe space, or only the students with no trauma will be able to learn in the way that I believe they should. Other students will be excluded from learning because of past trauma, and this exclusion will predominantly affect those who are most likely to experience violence, trauma, and exclusion in the world at large: women and trans* students, queer students and students and students of color.
As a safe space, it’s not that safe. We talk about dangerous things. We learn to think dangerously, outside of the comfort zone that says that frat boys in blackface is harmless fun. A safe space is not an easy space, or a comfortable one, or one outside of history or debate or free speech. A safe space is one that doesn’t merely reinforce or recapitulate the violence of the world at large. A safe space, even one that fully recognizes the trauma of its inhabitants, acknowledges its own inherent unsafety and the risks involved in thinking dangerously, allowing for all of its participants to show up.
This is not a safe space. This is the home of dangerous thought. Learning is supposed to stick, to penetrate, to shatter. But what it shatters, whether that danger is directed at our most vulnerable students or at the structural inequalities that keep us in our place, in the crosshairs, is up to us.
We need our students to show up for us. We need their passion, their dedication, their intellect, their perspectives. If our classrooms recapitulate the crosshaired world, if we exclude and retraumatize those who have come to us to learn, then we silence our own best hope for a different future, a world where we might all learn to think dangerously.