The university is where young people go to learn about the world around them, to prepare them for the experiences that lie ahead of them, and help them become fully independent adults. However, in the last decade or so, this has not been the case. Colleges have been coddling the student, protecting them from controversial or uncomfortable ideas, which they will have to face in their lives as adults. The university campus, once the bastion for new ideas and discussion, has turned into the oppressor of free speech for many people. Through the use of microaggressions, safe spaces, and free-speech zones, free speech is being oppressed on the university campus.
The Google definition for a microaggression is “a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority”. An example of a microaggression might be asking an Asian person if they are good at math or asking a black person if they are good at basketball. These two examples are relatively racist, and shouldn’t be said. The problem with microaggressions is what constitutes one is left completely up to the person supposedly receiving one. It can easily lead to one shutting down another’s speech by claiming what they are saying is a microaggression and is offending them. Therefore, any small joke, or any statement in general, could be interpreted as a microaggression, even if one did not mean to offend.  

In the past few years, microaggressions have become far too broad. It has come to the point where they limit everyday, normal speech.

“At the University of North Carolina, it’s not just the students walking on politically correct eggshells. Guidelines issued on the university’s Employee Forum aim to help staff avoid microaggressions in their interactions by cautioning against offensive phrases such as “Christmas vacation,” “husband/boyfriend” and “golf outing” (Richardson).

The microaggression stigma has been allowed to grow far too wide.

The phrase “Christmas vacation” has become a microaggression as it supposedly diminishes non-Christian holidays and other religions. Even complimenting a woman’s clothes or physical appearance is a microaggression, as it supposedly suggests that someone values her physical appearance more than her intellectual or character traits. An incident at Oberlin college occurred when a white, male student asked if a Latina student wanted to play “futbol”. The Latina student responded in a completely unreasonable way. She tells the white student that him using the word “futbol” was racist, as he himself was not Latin. She goes on about how white people don’t play soccer “right”, how him saying “futbol” is a microaggression, and she ends the conversation by saying “keep my heritage language out of your mouth”. This Latina student's argument was that because the white student was not Latin, him saying “futbol” was racist, and diminished her culture. This standpoint, that one race’s culture and language should stay inside that race, is wrong. If this were to happen, racism would only intensify. The mixing of cultures is a good thing. It has been a popular trend for colleges to adapt microaggressions into their orientation for freshman.

“Clark University, a progressive liberal-arts school in Worcester, Massachusetts, has embraced microaggressions as a pedagogical tool for incoming freshmen. And if what’s going on there is any indication, microaggressions are being defined so broadly and so subjectively that students who are exposed to them are likely to come away very, very confused about what constitutes acceptable speech on campus — and campus disciplinary systems could get seriously gummed up in the years to come” (Singal).

When colleges adapt these microaggressions into their curriculum, it gives students a way to suppress other people’s speech by claiming that they are committing a microaggression, as anything could be interpreted as a microaggression. Not only would free speech be suppressed, but it would also distract colleges from more important matters.

When someone says “safe space”, one might think of a place where one is safe from violence. They might think of a place where one can come to talk, like a therapist's office. What they do not think about is a place where several college students sit and play with Play-Doh and bubbles, yet that is exactly what one will find on many college campuses.

“The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs”(Hall).

University students have been so sheltered from controversial ideas that they have reverted to acting like pre-schoolers when confronted with something they don’t like. So they complain to the administrators, and the administrators have no choice but to suppress those potentially harmful ideas, cancelling debates and speakers.  The college safe space is a place where people can go to be safe from ideas that they don’t agree with. It is a place where they don’t have to see the other side of a debate. They don't have to listen or think.

“Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material”(Shulevitz).

Instead of preparing students for the world outside of education, colleges shelter students from controversial ideas. It has come to the point where universities have cancelled speakers and debates to shelter students from potentially harmful ideas. “The notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer” (Shulevitz).

Universities are teaching students a scary concept. If one is doesn’t agree with someone, find an idea uncomfortable, or just generally doesn’t like what another is saying, then that someone’s speech must be suppressed.

“Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy” (Malone).

Unfortunately for the students, there are no safe spaces in the real world, and they cannot shut other people up like they can on a university campus. This leaves young people with no idea how to deal with problems and differing standpoints. Not only that, but it is a threat to free speech, a cornerstone of American society.
Perhaps the most blatant and obvious violation of the First Amendment on the university campus is the so-called “free speech zone.” The free speech zone is the only place where students are allowed to express their opinions on campus. They are often sidewalk sized and way out of the way to have any meaningful traffic pass by. “Policies limiting free speech only to small zones on campus are distressingly common. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has concluded that roughly one in six colleges and universities have them” (Leef). It is not an anomaly. The tiny free speech zone is much too common.

The free speech zone is not like the microaggression or safe space in the sense that the it has already gone to court. The free speech zone has already been deemed unconstitutional in a federal district court.
“In a ringing victory for student rights, a federal district court declared today that the University of Cincinnati’s (UC’s) tiny “free speech zone” violates the First Amendment. In his order enjoining enforcement of the challenged free speech zone policy, United States District Judge Timothy S. Black held that UC’s free speech zone “violates the First Amendment and cannot stand.” The suit was filed by Ohio’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law in cooperation with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education” (Lukianoff).

The free speech zone has already been deemed unconstitutional, yet it still occurs all across America’s public universities. It is disgraceful that it takes a federal district court to tell a place of higher learning that people are allowed to express themselves and their opinions wherever they feel like.

The public university used to be a place where people could express themselves, where young adults are prepared for the world and modern workplace. Now it is a place where students are treated like children, kept away from uncomfortable subjects. People get offended at normal statements and subjects. When people want to express their ideas, they are subjugated to a tiny patch of grass or out of the way section of a parking lot. Through the use of microaggressions, safe spaces, and free speech zones, free speech is being oppressed on the college campus, and it needs to stop.

Works Cited
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Saul, Stephanie. "Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults." New York Times. New York Times, 6 Sept. 2016. Web. 11 Jan. 2017.
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