Tales From The Safe Space

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 23 – Manchester University Students’ Union To Debate Banning Conservatives

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Manchester University Students Union building

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Activists at the University of Manchester Students’ Union are to debate a motion which would essentially ban conservatism and enshrine one particular leftist worldview as the only acceptable political thought on campus

The students’ union at Manchester University never had a particularly strong commitment to democracy and free speech, preferring to act as one of those authoritarian talking shops where activists percolate in their own ideological certainties.

The university is rated Amber while the students’ union has consistently been rated Red in the Spiked free speech rankings, meaning that together they preside over a chilling and hostile climate for freedom of speech on campus.

But the current set of illiberal policies are nothing compared to a new student-initiated union debate which could see David Cameron – and theoretically, by extension any conservative politician or personality – banned from campus on the grounds that they may harm or manipulate weak and vulnerable students with their dangerous right-wing ideas.

The text of the motion, due to be debated this Thursday (14 April), reads:

Ban David Cameron from the Students’ Union building

David Cameron is a dangerous Tory whom has continually attacked the welfare state with the intent of destroying it since the Tory government assumed absolute power in a so called “democratic” vote.

David Cameron and his right-wing Tory government were elected by a minority of the electorate, and zero students voted Tory, therefore we must make a stand against this undemocratic regime by banning David Cameron and his Tory government from our democratic Students Union and our University Campus.

In addition, David Cameron has continually violated the Safe-Space policy by implementing changes to Junior Doctors NHS contracts. We must fight back against the Tory steamroller which is destroying the NHS and destroying the United Kingdom and also Europe. Also David Cameron has said that we should vote to stay in the EU, but he is a Tory and therefore he must have lied, therefore to prevent him being able to manipulate venerable [sic] students at the University we must ban him.

The motion is so childish in its demands and so illiterate in its expression that only a year ago one may have wondered whether it was a clumsy parody. But life on campus in British and American universities has now indeed become such a sick joke that the motion was almost certainly submitted in earnest – and could well be adopted by authoritarian student activists regardless of the motive behind it.

This, after all, is the same students’ union which had an anti Safe Space petitioner dragged out of a student senate meeting by campus security for daring to criticise and speak over the Women’s Officer during a debate about abolishing the union’s Safe Space policy.

(Curiously, the motion to abolish the Safe Space policy was recorded as being rejected in the senate meeting minutes, although there were 38 votes for the motion, 3 against and 4 abstentions – I have contacted the students’ union for clarification on that rather surprising decision, and am awaiting their response).

University of Manchester Students Union

But consider the type of childish, underdeveloped mind which could seriously propose a motion to ban David Cameron from the students’ union (thus wrecking the prime minister’s plan to hang out there extensively in the near future).

The motion begins with the accusation that David Cameron is a “dangerous Tory”. Well, by that logic, so are the 11.3 million British citizens who cast their vote for the Conservative Party in the 2015 general election. Is this entire segment of the population also dangerous – or are they either evil and greedy people voting to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, or “venerable” people conned into voting the wrong way?

Laughably, the motion describes the Conservative Party’s return to power as being the result of a “so-called ‘democratic’ vote”. Now one can criticise the UK’s electoral system legitimately and with good reason, but Manchester University Students’ Union was not exactly the scene of hunger strikes or self-immolations when the Labour Party won the 2005 general election with 9.5 million votes and 35% of the national vote, which strongly suggests that this is politically (not constitutionally) motivated.

The author of the motion then goes on to claim, ludicrously, that “zero students voted Tory”, which speaks volumes about this particular student’s limited social circle and cheerfully ignorant closed mind. As it happens, some students do vote Conservative – in fact, there has been a slight rise in 18 to 34 year olds voting Tory, particularly women. The fact that many of these right-leaning students keep their political views so quiet is because to talk about them openly would be to invite hostility, ridicule and social ostracisation from the sanctimonious Left.

Slipping the surly bonds of earth and touching the face of insanity, the pompous student motion continues:

In addition, David Cameron has continually violated the Safe-Space policy by implementing changes to Junior Doctors NHS contracts. We must fight back against the Tory steamroller which is destroying the NHS and destroying the United Kingdom and also Europe.

So now, taking a position in an industrial dispute which does not directly affect a single member of the students union is still a grave violation of the Union’s safe space policy. The author of the motion asks us to believe that government running the country and making decisions which anger the Left and the public sector actively makes students unsafe.

And the motion wraps up with the naive and childish statement that David Cameron “is a Tory and therefore he must have lied” about wanting Britain to stay in the European Union. In fact, David Cameron did lie inasmuch as he falsely presented the negligible and non-binding results of his abject capitulation as a bold renegotiation that would result in some kind of reformed EU.

But it was David Cameron’s own lack of character and patrician disregard for democracy which caused him to lie – not the fact that he is a Tory. One could just as easily seek to ban all Labour politicians and personalities from Manchester University by claiming that Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and yet one can be certain that if Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn set foot on campus tomorrow, these students would drop whatever they were doing and follow him around like he was the Messiah.

University of Manchester - Occupied

One would hope that Manchester University Students’ Union will reject this babyish motion out of hand when it is earnestly debated at this Thursday’s Senate meeting, on the grounds that it makes everyone who touches it look stupid.

One would hope that there are enough liberty-loving students at Manchester to prevent the adoption of a measure designed to infantilise them and treat them as delicate snowflakes incapable of so much as being in the presence of people who disagree with them (though such sensible people tend to be repulsed by student politics and stay well away).

One would hope that the idea of passing a symbolic motion banning the democratically elected – not to mention remarkably dull and centrist – prime minister from setting foot on union property would be laughed out of the house by student leaders who realise that demonising over a third of the country for their perfectly legitimate political views makes honest political debate impossible, and (most dangerously) enshrines one particular left-wing ideology as the only “acceptable” political opinion.

One would like to think a good many warm and positive things about the generation of Stepford Students currently passing through our academic institutions, both here in Britain and in America. But every day we are given ten times as many reasons to despair as causes to hope.

And now we have the ludicrous spectacle of Manchester University students earnestly debating whether or not they need to protect themselves by placing a de facto restraining order on David Cameron and his Evil Tory brethren.

As Manchester goes, so goes every other major university in the country. Never has a group of students been so in need of a robust, small-L liberal education, yet so thoroughly unprepared to receive one at university.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 22 – Students For Slightly Less Coddling!

Samuel Hooper1 Comment
NUS Protest - No Platform Policy - Free Speech
What do we want? Slightly less censorship! When do we want it? At some point!

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The student resistance to campus safe space policies and academic trigger warnings does not inspire much confidence

This student from the University of South Florida is mad as hell at being coddled and treated like a child with endless trigger warnings and safe spaces on campus, and she is not going to take it any more:

At USF’s Faculty Senate Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday, faculty members discussed trigger warnings and how to approach sensitive issues as they sought an answer to the growing demand for “tolerance” in classrooms.

No one is arguing most graphic material shouldn’t come with a warning, but creating campus-wide policies catered to coddling students will only inhibit our education.

So far so good. But it doesn’t take long before the wheels start to come off this student’s plea to be treated like an adult:

Obviously, no one wants a student to undergo stress or anxiety because of something they were blindsided with in class. However, it is ultimately up to both the professor and the student to ensure they can avoid that situation.

Professors need to begin offering detailed syllabi for their classes. Not a basic one-page overview of the course, but a week-by-week outline of what they intend to teach. While some professors already offer a detailed breakdown of their courses, many do not.

Yes, this will take more time to create, but let’s be honest — most professors don’t make major changes to their courses. Taking the time to create a detailed syllabus isn’t a big deal considering they can re-use it for years with just minor tweaks along the way.

Then it’s up to the students. Students, take five minutes out of your oh-so-busy schedule and actually read the syllabus handed out on the first day of class. If you see something is going to be covered that will trigger you, drop the class.

Do some research. Find out exactly what you’ll be reading before you commit to a course, and you won’t be caught off guard when the sensitive material comes.

Universities could even have a frank conversation with incoming students at orientation or during campus tours. Let them know this is a university, not an elementary school. In an effort to grow students’ minds and character, the university will approach subjects students may disagree with or find uncomfortable.

Oh dear. This isn’t so much an argument to sweep away the whole infantilising concept of trigger warnings and begin treating students like moderately resilient human beings once again, but rather a technical argument that trigger warnings should be brought forward to the beginning of the academic experience.

Breanne Williams is not upset with the idea of trigger warnings in general. She just wants one massive trigger warning placed at the beginning of each college class, or perhaps when students first arrive on campus. Quite how this is any less infantilising than individual content warnings before each lecture or book is never made clear.

Unfortunately, such is the calibre of much of the resistance to campus censorship these days. Even the voices arguing against the harshest and most illiberal measures often accept the general principle behind them – that words and text can be dangerous, and that students need to be protected from them.

Witness Edinburgh University students union officer Imogen Wilson, who stressed the importance of safe space policies to journalists even as she was being accused by others of violating the safe space of a student council meeting.

Or the protest outside the hugely censorious National Union of Students headquarters, where protesters held the risibly pathetic placards declaring “Reform, don’t scrap, no-platform policies”.

Depressingly, even some of the pushback against the censorious, infantilising treatment of students on campus now accepts the basic rationale behind trigger warnings and safe space policies. This is dangerous because conceding the fundamental principle – that free speech is dangerous, and that words can equate to “violence” – means that the debate becomes a simple matter of degrees, establishing an inevitable one-way ratchet to greater censorship.

The correct response to the slapping of trigger warnings on academic content is not “Please put them at the beginning of the class so that we can avoid studying entire subjects if we spot one thing in the syllabus which might cause us mental discomfort”.

The correct response is “To hell with your trigger warnings! Treat us like the adults that we are”.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 21 – Monetising Identity Politics With A Safe Space Coffee Shop

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Race_Together_(1)

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If safe space dwelling students don’t want to enter the grown-up job market and workplace when they graduate, they may simply create their own parallel Identity Politics economy

Until now, the one source of comfort to those of us alarmed by the rise in student illiberalism and authoritarianism on university campuses in Britain and America has been the fact that those tyrannical student activists will soon face a day of reckoning when they graduate and find themselves in a job market which has no interest in nurturing their fragile egos.

Sadly, that source of comfort is now being taken away from us. Because a former academic from Winchester, Virginia has found a way to successfully monetise the safe space concept with a coffee shop designed for “marginalized populations”.

Your4State reports:

A new coffee shop in the city of Winchester is one of many, but its owners say the open and safe environment it provides is the only one of its kind in the city.

According to Victoria Kidd, part-owner of the Hideaway Cafe, coffee is not an “accessory beverage,” and grabbing your cup of joe requires a journey to reach your ideal destination.

“You’re looking for a coffee house that offers you a great atmosphere and offers you a great product served by people who care about your opinion of the coffee and care about your experience here,” Kidd said.

For Kidd and her wife, Christy, the journey to open the perfect coffee house started in July when they thought of the safe-space concept for the Hideaway Cafe.

Because why leave safe spaces and infantilised life behind at graduation when you can continue behaving in the same sheltered, censorious way right through adult life?

(No press reports as yet give any detail as to precisely what policies or behaviour codes will make the Hideaway Cafe a safe space, or how the safe space will be enforced).

Of course, the cafe’s proprietor fits the exact profile that one would expect:

“Well I never thought I’d be in coffee,” [Dr. Jess] Clawson admitted.  “I have a Ph.D. in education. I’m an education historian, so I thought I would be teaching college right now and on the tenure track.”

According to Clawson, graduate school prepared her to co-own a coffee house.

She said the level of intensity in her master’s work translated well to creating drinks quickly and accurately.

She also mentioned that her dissertation was on the emergence of LGBT student visibility on Florida college campuses in the 70s and 80s.

Given her background, Clawson said she couldn’t refuse to be a part of the “safe space” business, which she said has been a long time coming.

Finding surprisingly little demand for her peerless knowledge of the LGBT university scene in 1970s Florida, Jess Clawson was forced to improvise and tenuously reapply her academic skills to the field of handcrafting caffeinated beverages. And so the Hideaway Cafe now exists to do for supposedly mature adults what campus safe spaces do for decidedly immature students – provide an intellectual cave where occupants can literally hide from scary ideas and the big bad world.

The Hideaway Cafe is not the first such institution to transform itself into a safe space venue. A coffee house at Claremont McKenna College did the same thing, though only on an ad hoc basis, and within an academic campus setting:

Safe spaces for minority students have appeared on the campuses of other Claremont Colleges as well. Last week, the Motley Coffeehouse at Scripps College issued a statement on its official Facebook page, “The Motley sitting room will be open tonight from 6-10 only for people of color and allies that they invite. Please feel free to come and use the space for whatever you need – decompress, discuss, grieve, plan, support each other, etc. In solidarity.”

But neither is Hideaway Cafe the first to bring the safe space concept to the outside world. Last year, Starbucks in Seattle announced that its stores would be working with the city police to turn their locations into safe places where victims of homophobic “hate crime” could wait until the police arrive.

Pink News reports:

The coffee chain has provided special training to its more than 2,000 Starbucks employees across 97 shops, training them to offer help to those who have been victims of hate crimes.

The initiative came about via a partnership with the Seattle Police Department, with special rainbow-coloured ‘SPD Safe Space’ stickers indicating each shop’s status. Staff will contact the authorities, ensuring victims are safe and allowing them to remain on the premises until police arrive.

The bold initiative is the first such take-up of a scheme by the chain, but Starbucks indicated that it would work with police departments elsewhere to set up ‘safe spaces’ in more cities.

This is somewhat less offensive – although the definition of “hate crime” is very vague and encapsulates many things which should probably be classified as protected free speech, at least the Starbucks safe spaces are reactive rather than anticipatory. They exist to help people who have been the victims of unpleasant homphobic experiences rather than seeking to restrict speech within the store lest somebody be offended.

But whether it is the Hideaway Cafe, the coffee shop at Claremont McKenna or your friendly local Starbucks, what is clear is that the idea of providing infantilising places of refuge for grown adults has escaped the college campus and is starting to be taken up in wider society – more ammunition for those of us who are constantly asked why we spend time fixating on something often portrayed as a niche student issue which poses no risk to wider society.

However, it cannot be said often enough that these censorious young generation now at university did not materialise out of thin air. Their self-centred outlook and inability to process contradictory or offensive ideas is very much a product of their environment and upbringing, and older people – including the liberal university administrators now being hounded and forced out of their jobs by emboldened student activists – bear much of the blame for having created a therapeutic culture and a climate which does not value free speech and is happy to place restrictions on freedom of expression for the comfort of others.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi goes further and suggests that older Americans are actually guilty of creating the first safe spaces and intellectual bubbles, long before they started appearing on college campuses.

Money quote:

But conservatives who get hysterical about the “delicate snowflakes” on campus should take a look at their own media-consumption habits. It’s hard to imagine anything funnier than a 70-year-old who watches 90 hours of Fox News a week and then rails against college kids who are afraid of new ideas.

But it’s not just Fox viewers. Most of the cable TV news industry is just a series of safe spaces. There are conservative channels and liberal channels, all of them huge seas of more or less unanimous opinion. Viewers tune in, suckle their thumbs, and wait to have their own opinions vomited back at them.

The commercial formula at the all-liberals-suck channel is the same as the one at the all-Republicans-are-boneheads channel. People in this country tend to follow politics in the same way they follow sports teams. They don’t think, they root.

The campus safe space movement is often derided as evidence of a rise of a newly censorious political left, a movement that’s ideological in character. And who knows, maybe that’s true. I don’t spend enough time on campuses to know.

But the safe space movement among the somewhat older members of the commercial media has virtually nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with money.

The political punditry business is all about riling up an ad-consuming, subscription-buying demographic. We’re paid by the eyeball, and you don’t attract eyes by sticking fingers in them. So opinion-makers on both sides quickly learn to stay in their lanes.

If your job is throwing meat to wingers, you’re not going to suddenly start admitting Mexicans are people or criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

And Taibbi’s conclusion:

The modern American media consumer has a genuine mania for orthodoxy. We’ve habituated readers and viewers not just to expect content that caters to all their opinions down the line, but also to expect and demand a completely binary representation of the political landscape: blue and red, Us and Them.

Consumers on both sides don’t like pundits whose views are all over the place. They want white hats and black hats, allies and enemies, even though in real life most people are not wholly one thing or another. And when one of the performers steps off-script, it’s a “problem.”

To me this is consumerism, not political correctness. Capitalism in this country has become so awesomely efficient at target-scratching every conceivable consumer itch that it’s raised a generation of people with no tolerance for discomfort, particularly the intellectual kind.

There are so many products available now that customers have learned to demand that every single purchase choice they make be perfectly satisfying. People want nacho chips that taste awesome every time, and they want pundits who agree with them every time. They don’t want to fork over time or money to be told they’re wrong or uninformed any more than they want to eat a salad.

This is a very valid point. For what are Fox News and MSNBC if not media-based safe spaces for adults who live in their own ideological bubbles, rarely socialising or venturing otuside their own circle, and whose news consumption is driven less by a desire to hear the facts and reach their own conclusion than the lazy desire to have existing suspicions and prejudices constantly reinforced?

One can certainly criticise the illiberalism of today’s college students for seeking out safe spaces and pressuring their university administrations to enforce harsh new speech and behavioural codes on campus, but one cannot blame the students alone.

Growing up in an MSNBC or Fox News household where the other side are routinely demonised as being evil, traitorous, un-American or oppressive means that many students may arrive at university without ever having been in close quarters with somebody with a different political philosophy. And just as they experience the first twinges of surprise and discomfort at the discovery of non like-minded people, the campus Identity Politics brigade rides to the rescue, telling them that they are right to be upset, that they are uniquely oppressed and that they require ideologically policed safe spaces just to get through the traumatic years which await them at university. It is a toxic message, but a very powerful and compelling one for many young adults.

So by all means let’s criticise instances of campus authoritarianism when they occur. It is important that we continue shining a spotlight on these incidents and helping liberty-minded students push back and wrest control of their campuses away from the priests and priestesses of the cult of Identity Politics.

But we should not be so smug as to think that we who have left university (or who never went) are in any way superior. For it turns out that older generations have been monetising the idea of safe spaces for years before the Hideaway Cafe even opened for business, and many of us have been unwittingly helping them to do so.

 

More Tales from the Safe Space here.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 20 – Segregated Accommodation For Ohio University LGBT Students

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LGBT - Segregation - Ohio University - Identity Politics - Safe Space

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Students seeking to cocoon themselves in safe spaces and segregated accommodation are being selfish – society can only grow in understanding and acceptance when people of different backgrounds and ideas are thrown together and forced to interact with one another

More depressing news of the return of segregation on American university campuses.

Latest to capitulate to the cult of Identity Politics is Ohio University, which is now introducing an LGBT-only housing community (or “living community”) for self-identifying gay, lesbian and transgender students, as well as their relatives and “allies”.

From the Athens Messenger:

Next year, Ohio University freshmen and sophomores who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans will have the option to reside in a new LGBT living community on the Athens campus. This new living community will be in addition to gender-neutral housing already offered by the university.

According to Delfin Bautista, director of the OU LGBT Center, next year will mark the fourth year for gender-neutral housing options for students. Bautista said the gender neutral housing was made available for not only transsexual students who wanted a safe space, but also siblings, other forms of relatives or even co-ed best friends.

In addition to the gender-neutral housing, Bautista said the university is rolling out a new living community catered to those who identify as LGBT. The living community will be located in Smith House on the South Green, which also is the location for the gender-neutral dorm options.

Bautista said the resident assistant overseeing the new living community will be “developing intentional experiences” for the LGBT members. Those who live in the community will have the opportunity to participate in LGBT-centered programming and will be connected to LGBT resources.

In other words, as soon as they set foot on campus at Ohio University, freshmen students will have the option to immediately find other people who look and think the same way as them, and then live and socialise exclusively with those like-minded people to the exclusion of all others.

This is utterly antithetical to what should be any university’s mission – to turn out resilient, well-rounded and intellectually capable students who are able to flourish in the world, overcoming adversity and achieving success on their own merits. This gender-neutral housing may do many things, but one thing it will absolutely not do is help those who choose to live in it to become more resilient people.

Rather, students living in Ohio University’s segregated LGBT accommodation will be overseen by an RA (resident assistant) who develops “intentional experiences” for the community. In other words, their time at college will be curated for them in such a way that makes this one aspect of their personhood – their sexuality or gender – seem like the overriding and defining feature of their lives. How could it not? Because of this one facet of their identity, these students will be told that they are so different from the wider university community (or so at risk from a malevolent, unsafe outside world) that they need to study, socialise and dwell in seclusion from other students.

But there is another side to this.

How do those from minority groups who choose to hide themselves away in micro-communities of similar people ever hope to bring about a more tolerant and understanding society, when at every turn they seek to shun debate, shut down free speech and even voluntarily segregate themselves away from the wider community?

Nearly all of the positive steps forward our societies have taken to overcome racism, xenophobia and every manner of intolerance were made possible by engagement – by people from minority groups standing up and being an unapologetic, highly visible presence in their communities. That’s why antipathy to immigration is often highest in areas with the lowest number of immigrants, for example. As soon as the immigrants appear in larger numbers (provided they come in good faith and attempt to assimilate) the fears of the original community tend to subside.

Do those early, conspicuous arrivals sometimes face hostility, and even violence? Regrettably, yes. But how much longer would the process of desegregation in America (for example) taken if black students in the 1960s had insisted on living in segregated accommodation?

Ohio University LGBT Center

Civil rights trailblazers like Vivian Malone Jones, one of the first black students to enrol at the University of Alabama back in 1963, faced unprecedented hostility from the governor of the state on downwards – yet Jones did not demand a safe space, despite her physical safety at times being under very real threat.

By contrast, today’s student activists seek refuge in designated Safe Spaces despite never having to experience anything like the genuine lack of safety faced by Jones, and with the benefit of overwhelmingly supportive university administrations falling over themselves to adopt every diversity policy asked of them. With ninety percent of the battle for equality already won, suddenly the social justice warriors are growing thin skins.

Worse still, those students today who want to tell the whole world about their pain and have endless discussions about their own emotions are shamefully neglecting their duty to the next generation of LGBT, queer and ethnic minority students. They are prioritising their own tremulous fear of encountering bigotry or disagreement over the duty which they should feel toward those who will follow in their footsteps.

If minority students cloister themselves away in segregated accommodation and socialise in ethnic-based safe spaces and societies, they fail to help the wider community grow in acceptance. Sure, they may counter that racist and bigoted students should simply mend their ways and change their retrograde opinions without needing to be shown that black, Hispanic, gay, lesbian or trans students are just like them. But human nature is often such that acceptance only comes when something is familiar.

Whether this is fair or not, at some point these students will leave university and enter the real world. Surely, then, living as part of the general community and slogging through any difficult or painful situations which may arise as a result is good for the minority students as well as for the wider community.

But sadly, the social justice warriors of Generation Me Me Me tend not to see things that way. The millennial generation – my generation – is far more interested in talking about what the world owes us (jobs, houses, material possessions) rather than what we owe our communities and our country. Many would rather talk endlessly about their pain and the wrongs which have been inflicted on them than comport themselves with dignity (like previous generations of civil rights heroes) and, through their stoic presence on campus, forge a smoother path for those who come after them.

Many of these student activists would be hugely offended by this accusation – they do not realise that their sit-ins and hunger strikes are inherently selfish acts designed to rectify perceived wrongs against themselves (at best) or to simply signal their own virtue (at worst). Their activism is inwardly focused either on winning perks and concessions for themselves, or seeking to punish those who have caused them offence – in other words, it is a plain old fashioned power play by student activists against the university administrators (who, ironically, were themselves once activist students fighting their own university hierarchies).

The trouble with Safe Space theory – and with Ohio University’s new segregated campus accommodation for LGBT students – is that it focused entirely on the now, with no thought to the future. There is no recognition of the fact that coddling students today both fails to prepare them for life after graduation, and also hinders society’s progress in becoming more accepting of different people. As our hedonistic, therapeutic culture dictates, it is all about feeling better in the here and now, with no thought given to tomorrow.

This is what happens when toxic Identity Politics culture meets a uniquely self-entitled generation concerned with their own personal self-realisation above all else. You can fully expect to see lots more segregated university accommodation springing up in America, with Britain following along in a couple of years.

Not because it will do anything to bring about a more just or equal society – it won’t – but because it makes people feel good in the here and now.

 

Postscript: It is worth pointing out that Ohio University actively encourages transgender students to live in this segregated accommodation.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 19 – Cardiff Students Hold “Inner Child Day”

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Cardiff University Students Union - Inner Child Day - Infantilisation - Safe Space

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Good mental health does not mean regressing back into childhood

One of the most insidious things to emerge from the Cult of Identity Politics taking over Anglo-American university campuses is the false equating of good mental health with a state of childhood.

Safe spaces, campus speech codes and trigger warnings all serve to infantilise students, in the belief that if only these young adults are coddled like children and protected from ever encountering a dissenting opinion or a negative word, it might just be possible to preserve their fragile mental equanimity.

One of the most overt recent manifestations of this trend is the “Inner Child Day” recently held at Cardiff University (the same institution whose students were so traumatised by the hateful presence of Germaine Greer on campus last year).

The ad promoting Inner Child Day encouraged Cardiff students to “embrace your inner child with a whole day of free fun in Y Plas in Cardiff University’s SU! Think inflatables, games, face painting and some 90s classics!”. Because apparently university is no longer a place to emerge into adulthood, but rather place to regress back to the habits and mentality of a toddler.

Johanna Williams paints an excruciating picture of the event in an article in Spiked:

It took place in the nightclub of the students’ union building and featured such mental-health managing strategies as biscuit-decorating, dog-petting, face-painting and jumping about on a bouncy castle. Students were able to work towards the holy grail of positive mental health by practising their forward rolls and uploading pictures of their newly ornamented biscuits to social media in return for the approval of their peers.

The nightclub was suitably decorated. There were balloons everywhere to appeal to the six-year-old children just waiting to burst out of the students’ twentysomething bodies. A giant screen at the front of the room showed a woman cradling a miniaturised version of herself as someone would cradle a child. Apparently, the phrase ‘Can your inner-child come out to play?’ was meant ‘to offer hope to sufferers’.

Watching this event unfold was like walking into a perverse version of Alice in Wonderland. Twentysomething adults were catapulting themselves towards a healthier state of mind on the bouncy castle with an abandon that would get them banned from any normal event involving bouncy castles.

This all sounds disturbingly similar to the Safe Space room set aside during a debate at Brown University in Rhode Island, in which students who felt “triggered” by what they heard during a voluntarily attended meeting were offered infantilising consolations such as puppy videos, snacks, soft furnishings and Play Doh, as well as an army of trained counsellors.

Williams concludes:

This attempt to fight insanity with insanity is worrying. The trend towards medicalising everyday moods, to treat, say, the homesick student as someone with a mental-health problem, has led to the creation of a bogus epidemic of mental ill-health on campus. This means that people who suffer from a genuine mental illness, such as schizophrenia, are missing out on support because too much attention is focused elsewhere.

These childish events will do nothing to help students who are genuinely unwell. What’s worse, they’ll make today’s pampered students even less likely to grow up.

Williams is right. This is dangerous stuff, inflating good mental health with a regression to a sanitised version of childhood, with face painting and cookies and puppy dog videos. And whatever transitory benefit it may provide to students who are not really mentally ill but are simply stressed or homesick, it will do nothing for – and in fact diverts attention and resources away from – the far smaller number who are genuinely in need of help.

True mental health comes about by building a healthy resilience to the kind of everyday emotional bumps and scrapes which characterise adult life. In the real world, people sometimes have completely contradictory views about fundamental issues, but must nonetheless live, shop and work together.

Safe space policy makes that harder by sending the message that students should not have to so much as glimpse opposing ideas, while the entire cult of Identity Politics is built on the notion of a backbiting Hierarchy of Privilege, where everybody is an oppressor and nearly everyone (except for cis white men at the top of the pyramid) is also oppressed.

This culture does not produce resilient, well-rounded adults. Rather, it is producing a generation of self-involved, narcissistic adult babies who worship at the altar of their chosen “identity” and demand that everybody else admire their idiosyncrasies, acknowledge their pain and massage their egos on pain of censorship or disciplinary action.

And if none of that stirs you to anger, then at least be outraged by Cardiff University Student Union’s cynical, tawdry trivialisation of mental health, and the suggestion that ten minutes on a bouncy castle and a spot of face painting are the cure for those students who suffer from genuine mental health issues.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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