How can we constitute safe spaces if there is no collective negotiation about their contingency and reflexivity. It is more than designating places, rather it is about community discourse.
If the campus is not safe, then there cannot be “safe spaces” within the campus; can you ever flee to a safe zone in time to feel safer. At what moment is a safe space also a refuge.
A zone of speech insulation or protection seems counterintuitive in the context of a public sphere and the presence of wireless communication.
The campus itself must be as safe a space as society rather than some now contradictory and hypothetical in loco parentis safety.
However, advertising that one maintains within one’s immediate environment “a safe space” while not any kind of absolute guarantees of safety is more about the “not safe” status of the campus as opposed to one’s office or classroom.
Is a code of conduct or an honor code applicable equally to all members of a campus community.
OTOH, public spaces are “not safe” these days, regardless, and free speech should be embraced in terms of its inability to be controlled, especially with the apparently arbitrary nature of institutional responsibility.
If the city block is not safe ...
On college campuses — nominally bastions of free inquiry, robust debate, constructive lessons in failure, and unexpected discovery — there exists a prevailing controversy over the scope and meaning of free speech.
Some believe the universal right to free expression should extend to all, even ideas that are deemed a threat to the public interest (as homosexuality was only a generation ago) or which are a threat to prevailing conventional wisdom and political norms (as miscegenation was in much of the country, as well).
A competing viewpoint holds that free speech is just a cop-out code phrase, mostly working in the service of professional trolls or entitled jerks to abusively act out with impunity…
PEN America, the literary and human rights association that lists as one of its core principles a commitment to "protect open expression in the United States and worldwide," set out to explore the state of free speech on the nation’s campuses — reexamining several high-profile incidents and controversies. While not comprehensive, the report, published this fall, is impressively thorough, treating much of its content as teachable case studies, rather than a set of self-affirming anecdotes.
Some press coverage, however, suggested that the PEN America report — titled “And Campus For All: Diversity, Inclusion, and Freedom of Speech at U.S. Universities" — had exonerated campuses from the charge that they insufficiently protect free speech, and that it sided with students who think “cries of ‘free speech’ are too often used as a cudgel against them,” as the New York Times put it.
Taken in its totality, PEN America's report rejects the idea that free speech is a tool of oppression. Yet the report differs from the standard conservative anti-“PC” diatribe in that it also shows a great deal of sympathy for the concerns of minority groups on campus. Adding further nuance, the authors spend a great deal of time explaining how free speech is a vital tool for people removed from the traditional power structures at America's institutions of higher learning.
Given how much space the report gives to the testimony of students who feel marginalized and targeted on campuses, the report will surely displease certain free speech absolutists, who might be inclined to argue that today's college students need to get over their addiction to hurt feelings. Such people would also likely roll their eyes at the report's defense of the positive role of "safe spaces" (very narrowly defined) on campus…
In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort…
PEN America argues that too often “protests and forms of expression are treated as if they are incursions on free speech when they are manifestations of free speech.” But the group rightly draws the line at shouting down speakers…
The same rights that can be put "in service of a right-wing agenda" (as the Times put it in its piece about the PEN report) are also the best tools available for marginalized voices on the left and everywhere in between. As we approach the "Trump era," perhaps student activists will be less inclined to put their faith in rigidly defined policies executed by faceless authority figures — and more inclined to embrace free speech, in all its unwieldy, essential glory.
www.vox.com/...
Are Campuses themselves an “area of refuge”.
“A rising generation may be turning against free speech,” the report warns. “Before these developments deepen and harden, PEN America hopes to open up a wider, more searching dialogue that can help all sides to these debates better identify common ground.”
Campus speech debates are somewhat new territory for PEN, a writers’ organization that historically has been concerned with protecting authors and journalists around the world, whether from censorship and imprisonment or more amorphous threats like electronic surveillance…
The report’s three main case studies cover complex conflicts on three campuses that drew intense media coverage in the past year: over the line between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism at U.C.L.A.; over sexual harassment, academic freedom and Title IX protections at Northwestern University; and over free speech and Halloween costumes at Yale University.
Areas of Refuge
If a person with disability cannot get far enough away from the danger by using Horizontal Evacuation, then that person should seek an Area of Refuge. An area of refuge serves as a temporary haven from the effects of a fire or other emergency. A person with a severe mobility impairment must have the ability to travel from the area of refuge to the public way, although such travel might depend on the assistance of others. Such an area should have the following: 1) telephone communication, 2) a sprinkler system, and 3) one-hour fire-rated assembly (i.e., fire-rated door, walls, ceiling). Specific areas of refuge for each building will be designated by signage at the handicap entrances.
Usually, the safest areas of refuge are pressurized stair enclosures buildings, and open-air exit balconies. Other possible areas of refuge include: fire rated corridors or vestibules adjacent to exit stairs' Some campus buildings feature fire rated corridor construction that may offer safe refuge. Taking a position in a rated corridor next to the stair is a good alternative to a small stair landing crowded with the other building occupants using the stairway.