'Safe Zone' fallacy

OVER THE LAST WEEK, protesters at the University of Missouri accomplished some amazing things: Using direct action and nonviolent protest to spotlight disturbing incidents of racism on campus and forcing the ouster of the university system president who was too slow to react.

But then, to paraphrase the great Frank and Nancy Sinatra, they had to spoil it all by doing something stupid: Claiming a zone of taxpayer-funded, public property as some kind of "safe zone" where others, but particularly journalists, would be denied the fundamental rights of freedom to move about, freedom to shoot video and pictures and freedom to ask questions, the rights that are enshrined in the First Amendment in our Bill of Rights.

As students blocked journalists from a tent city on public university grounds, Concerned Students 1950 wrote on its Twitter feed: "We truly appreciate having our story told, but this movement isn't for you" - unconsciously and hopefully unknowingly echoing the white racists like Alabama's Bull Connor and allies who'd labored hard and sometimes successfully to block journalists from covering the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. Even worse was a so-called "communications" professor with an appointment in Missouri's nationally prestigious journalism department, the prosaically named Melissa Click, who called for "muscle" to physically harass and block journalists of the kind that she allegedly teaches.

Since Tuesday, there have been positive developments: Concerned Students 1950 has backtracked and expressed a willingness to deal with the media; Click has apologized and severed her ties with the journalism department (which still isn't enough in my book; if Tim Wolfe had to go, and he did, then Melissa Click should be one-click deleted from the university roster). But the one-day brouhaha ripped open a wound involving colleges campuses and free speech that has been festering for some time.

In Missouri, at least, students with laudable goals fell back on some deplorable tactics. At Yale, hundreds of students have joined a protest that is hard to even summarize other than that it's bat-guano crazy - what started as a legitimate if perhaps overwrought discussion about Halloween costumes then devolved into an embarrassing mass verbal-harassment campaign against an adult residence-hall "master," riddled with foul language and with one student shouting: "It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It's about creating a home here."

Arguably even more troublesome are the events at Wesleyan University, where the campus newspaper had the gall (I'm being sarcastic) to publish an op-ed that mildly questioned the Black Lives Matters movement; in response, students first threatened to block delivery of the paper and then the student government cut the paper's funding. Godwin's law prevents me from saying what I truly think about that.

Even a news organization with a handful of readers has a right to be in a public space, take pictures and ask questions, just like activists have the right (and have accomplished amazing things in exercising it) to film police on a public sidewalk. Indeed, ask yourself how you might feel if the cops declared they needed "a safe space" to arrest (and maybe rough up, since you're no longer watching) protesters.

To see the two things that I've always fought for as a writer in the public arena - social justice and unfettered free expression - at war with each other is something that I find heartbreaking. I've been a fervent, sometimes overzealous, defender of the Black Lives Matter movement, literally from the August 2014 weekend when an unarmed Mike Brown was gunned down in the streets of Ferguson - and I've been continually harassed on social media and in numerous hate emails for doing so. And I find racist, sexist or homophobic Halloween costumes utterly repulsive. But those aren't the principles at stake here. Hostility toward free speech and a free press might buy you an hour or two of "safe space" but they won't win the war against social injustice.

In a time of rampant inequality and corporate hegemony in America, we need a revolution - and we need to be producing "street fighters" of ideas, not coddled retreaters to their intellectually spotless "home." For America to someday be the great nation it can truly be requires intellectually dangerous spaces, not safe ones.

Off campus, you're not going to be dealing with wishy-washy emailing professors or 19-year-olds wanting to shoot some video for the college newspaper, but actual determined enemies - racist and reactionary bozos and heartless billionaires who'll ship your job overseas before they give you a raise from $8 an hour, and deport your parents just for the hell of it. And when these bad guys fight back, and they will, trust me - you're not going to want a safe space. You're going to want the whole world watching.