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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

It's important to acknowledge that the term "safe space" means different things to different people.

To the Yale protestors (who were widely supported at UChicago) the entirety of university housing at Yale was meant to be a "safe space," so it was incumbent on the university to fire professors who voiced unwelcome opinions in that space.

To many of the people who are angry about this letter, "safe space" means a support-group-like room in a specific place at a specific time, which doesn't interfere with the rest of the university's operations.

I suspect it is the former which Dean Ellison meant to attack. I find it hard to believe that he's trying to shut down, for example, group therapy programs for LGBTQ youth offered by the psychology arm of the university's student health system. But I do appreciate him sending the message, "we're not going to fire professors because you don't like what they said."

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I think you nailed it here. My safe space is Alcoholics Anonymous, and having that safe space probably saved my life.

It's unfortunate that the term has been somewhat taken over and always incites such ferocious debate on HN and other communities on the internet. I doubt anyone here is against there being LGBTQ support or Narcotic Anonymous groups on campus.

Yeah, all these words mean different things to the Social Justice/Progressive left and the rest of us.

It's one of the surest tells that a movement is wrong when they refuse to use the regular meanings of words and start redefining them in their own usage. People who are right never have to resort to such contrivances.

You're absolutely correct, and this illuminates an aspect of the controversy that I don't think gets quite enough coverage: where did the social justice/progressive left students learn about the terminology and ideology they advocate?

They almost certainly didn't learn it in high school, from their peers in high school, or from their parents. (Although that may be changing.)

They learned these things at the university, from professors, and from fellow students who learned from the same professors.

In other words, academia brought this situation upon itself by teaching these things to students -- -- so I'm rather leery of analyses which blame millennials for pushing a self-indulgent worldview on universities. If the same ideas had been taught to previous generations of students, they too would have advocated trigger warnings and safe spaces.

>They learned these things at the university, from professors, and from fellow students who learned from the same professors.

I know what all of these things mean, and I didn't learn any of them from college, I learned them from reading blog posts and things online.

I'm sure a lot of other people did too, but I suspect the vast majority of college students never heard those things until they arrived at college.

Which is why I'm sure you use the word "colored" (or worse) instead of african/african-american, homosexual instead of gay, tranny instead of transwoman/transman, and similar?

After all, words are just irrelevant symbol strings on top of a meaning, right? If you're not really racist, it shouldn't matter if you only ever refer to people of the global majority by slurs. The surest tell a movement is wrong is when they refuse to use the regular meanings of words.

If we're trying to communicate and understand the world together, what specific words we use don't matter, only that we agree on what they mean. We could even speak a completely non English language.

If you're instead trying to show which American political tribe you belong to, the concerns you mention become very important.

Found the sjw.

I think you are right. Here is the page from the Chicago LGBTQ student group on how they implement and create safe spaces for students: https://lgbtq.uchicago.edu/page/safe-space

While I agree with you, I think it's worth noting that Yale's system of on-campus housing is drastically different than that at most universities. The residential college system offers much closer and personal interactions with a set of deans, faculty, and staff that is reinforced over the entire four years at the school. Whatever one's stance on the Yale controversy, I think it's important to distinguish Yale's housing system from standard college dorms.

I'm personally somewhat familiar with the distinction, but I don't really see how it's relevant. Pretty much every college dorm, including those that are less tight knit and personal than Yale's system, offers a safe space and protection from harassment. If anything, the fact that Yale fosters closer relationships with administrators and faculty should make it _more_ likely that students would take gentle advice from their house master with equanimity instead of unhinged screaming and calls for his ouster.

> If anything, the fact that Yale fosters closer relationships with administrators and faculty should make it _more_ likely that students would take gentle advice from their house master with equanimity instead of unhinged screaming and calls for his ouster.

That's one way it's relevant, to answer your first sentence. The fact that Yale fosters this family-esque relationship with peers, faculty, and deans is one of the contributing factors to extremely emotional response of the protesters, right or wrong. This fact was glossed over in almost all media reportings.

Chicago also fosters this family-esque relationship in housing, but also builds its identity on students in housing common spaces debating (including topics with political relevance) over meals and long into the night.

Absolutely. But what he actually said was "we don't condone 'safe spaces'".

The charitable way of interpreting that is "The university as an organization will not lend their institutional support for enforcing 'safe spaces'. If you want one, make it and enforce it yourself"

Is that really what "we don't condone" means?

That's not what "condone" means. And, with trigger warnings he explicitly said they don't support them - so it's reasonable to assume that if he meant "support' here that's what he would have said.

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