Colleges Have Spent Decades Trying to Help Students Feel “Safe.” Recent Events Show That That’s Not Working.

For the past decade or so, battles over campus “safety” have been fought on the grounds of language and expression: words said in class, readings assigned, art displayed, or speakers invited whom some group of students claimed made them unsafe, even in the absence of physical threats or recognizable danger. Over the past two weeks, as police have raided college campuses and arrested students, faculty, and other protesters from Columbia to UCLA to UT-Austin to Indiana University, and as counterprotesters at UCLA launched violent attacks on students, these real dangers to the safety of students have put the battles over language in a harsh light. Students are being tear-gassed and fired upon with rubber bullets. Professors have been tackled and arrested. The scenes of dozens of armed cops in riot gear marching toward university buildings or rows of tents housing kaffiyeh-clad undergrads have been apocalyptic—especially after some of those same cops did not immediately interfere when a right-wing mob seemed to have attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment, as well as student journalists, at UCLA, resulting in a series of injuries.

Well before the cops got involved, some of the progressive and far-left students protesting the war in Gaza found that the language of “safety” was being used against them, as their ideological opponents have (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not) claimed that the demonstrations are harmful and even dangerous. And these groups gave as good as they got, alleging to be the actual ones in peril, thanks to Islamophobia, accusations of antisemitism, and opposition to the protests, which have drawn counterprotesters and sparked attempts to reveal protesters’ identities either online or, as at Columbia, on the streets, via the use of “doxxing trucks.”

Right now, national attention is understandably on the actual violence at hand. But that violence, and all of the argument that preceded it, should be the beginning of a serious reconsideration. Well before Israel’s war in Gaza and the U.S. campus protests of it, This is harmful and it makes me unsafe was a familiar claim on college campuses. In the shadow of actual violence, the merely ideologically offensive pales, and the suggestion that even challenging ideas are inherently “unsafe” seems laughable. We should keep it that way.

Most of the pro-Palestinian protests have been peaceful. Some have broken the law and vandalized property, but the gatherings have generally, until very recently, failed to result in bodily injury. But since the police have been brought in, protesters have been arrested with varying degrees of force, with some thrown to the ground, tackled, tear-gassed, fired upon with rubber bullets, or otherwise manhandled by law enforcement called in by the universities. And although the protests have not routinely been violent, many have felt as if they were walking right up to the edge. Jewish students in particular have faced serious threats of violence or heard their classmates argue they should be killed; some of the groups organizing the protests have cheered on murderous terrorist groups or recast even those who slaughtered innocent civilians as “resistance” fighters. All of these incidents are shocking and appalling—and they stand in sharp contrast to the appeals for intellectual and emotional safety that have increasingly characterized life on college campuses, even in postcollege progressive spaces.

For decades, college administrators and professors have emphasized student safety, promising that students won’t just be physically safe on their campuses but will feel safe. The particulars of what that might entail are necessarily fuzzy, but essentially the message is that students will feel affirmed and that colleges have an obligation to avoid deeply offending student sensibilities, particularly along the lines of identity and religious belief.

Accusations of wrongdoing often fly to the linguistic: acts or words that people find offensive, distasteful, or bigoted are recast as “dehumanizing” or “violent.” Emphasis shifts away from intent, free expression, or even a reasonable interpretation of events onto “harm,” a kind of emotional trump card demanding not just attention but........

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