It’s not the first time that Starbucks has been embroiled in controversy with regard to race. Almost 3 years ago, ex-CEO Howard Schultz, tried to initiate conversations about race in Starbucks stores, through his ‘Race Together’ initiative. But his good intentions were not well-received because by all assessments, it was not well thought out. But there is no denying it was brave — and risky — as far as corporate race initiatives go.

Last week, Starbucks was again caught up in conversations about race in America. But this is not the kind of conversation they ever wanted to be having. Social media sharing means that the racist behavior of Starbucks employees in calling the police on two black men waiting for a friend, and the racist response of the Philadelphia police who arrested the two black men for doing nothing but waiting for a friend to share conversation over coffee, is now common knowledge. And the discussion that followed is just another chapter in the never-ending book about #livingwhileblack in America.

With nearly 175,000 US-based partners (Starbucks’ name for employees), it is no easy feat for Starbucks (or any employer) to have all their employees reflect their expressed values of inclusivity. And Starbucks is just one more company facing bad press because of the racist behavior of their employees.

However, the way that Starbucks has responded to this shameful incident is a lesson in corporate crisis response. And the (black) Philadelphia police commissioner, Richard Ross should look to Starbucks for how to respond to racist behavior among his ranks; instead of towing the blue line and saying that Philadelphia police did the right thing in arresting two black men for sitting in a coffee shop waiting for a friend to arrive before they ordered coffee. Commissioner Ross’ mention of the anti-discrimination training his team gets — which includes trips to both the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. — implies that they have done their bit, and so there was no responsibility on their part. This is what we are used to hearing from police forces across the country: “We did nothing wrong”. Really?!!!

Of course, the ideal situation is that the racist behavior of the Starbucks employee would never happen. Let’s be clear: training wont make every racist ready to sing kumbaya around the multi-racial campfire, but it doesn’t mean that expectations are clear and so are the consequences. We live in a white supremacy rooted in a centuries-long history of the devaluation of black lives, especially those of black men, so that’s not going away any time soon. But the social and corporate response to discrimination matters. And though no response is ‘perfect’, Starbucks did what more corporations should do in response to any ‘ism’, of which they have been accused.

So what did Starbucks do right?

1. They owned their mistakes. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson wasted no time in saying what happened in their Philadelphia store was not right and did not reflect Starbucks’ values. He explicitly did not blame the employee. He owned it. He said it was the fault of management, and ultimately thus it was his fault. No back-pedaling necessary. Of course, not everyone was happy with the corporate tweeted apology, but as far as corporate responses go, this was as good as corporate lawyers would probably allow.
2. CEO leads the way. Soon after the ‘official’ corporate response of a tweeted paragraph, CEO Kevin Johnson released a letter re-stating an apology, saying what steps they were going to take, including a face-to-face apology with the two African American men, and working with experts to make change. He followed up with a video making a personal apology and taking personal responsibility for what would happen next. He explicitly did not blame the employee responsible, but blamed store policy and management. If only police chiefs would do this — including Philadelphia police commissioner, Richard Ross — when their employees do wrong, community/police relations would be eons ahead of where they currently stand.
3. Respond quickly. With the viral nature of social media that makes news spread quickly across the globe, waiting to respond to bad press can result in boycotts and loss of revenue for companies. So taking control of the narrative as soon as possible is the best way to minimize the negative impact of bad behavior. The incident happened on Thursday, April 12 and Kevin Johnson responded by Twitter on Saturday, April 14. This response got critiqued by the mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, who blamed Starbucks for what happened.
4. Work on change, and hire the best. Clearly something went wrong in that Philadelphia store and it would have been easy to fire the employee, and rollout a long-term plan for training in anti-bias. So what did Starbucks do? Within a few days they announced that they are closing all stores on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 29 to implement training developed in consultation with some of the country’s leading experts in this work, including Brian Stephenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, and former US Attorney General Eric Holder. Closing nearly 8,000 stores for an afternoon will mean a significant economic hit and shows commitment.
5. Monitor/evaluate progress. It’s easy to do a one-shot training to silence critics and hope that the problem goes away. Instead, there is an explicit commitment to monitoring and evaluating the impact of the training. Furthermore, this training will be part of future on-boarding for all new hires.
6. Share what they learn. The training materials that will be developed for implementation at Starbucks will be shared at no cost with others. Google and Facebook set the precedent by having their implicit bias training videos uploaded to YouTube for public consumption. Facebook eventually expanded their offerings to include 7 videos with a specific implicit bias link. Making these resources available is a nice goodwill effort, even though I’m not sure how much impact they have, given how Facebook still is missing a lot of brown faces in their workforce. But it’s a start, and it sets an example. And it allows less-resourced organizations to learn from the best.

In an ideal world, the criminalization of just being black in America would not happen. But we live in a world very far from such an ideal. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of everyone to do something when they see something. Like Melissa DePino, a self-identified middle-aged, upper-middle-class white woman, who heads a marketing and communications firm, did when she recorded the video and shared it with the public. And although the impact of recording and sharing racism in America does not usually lead to owning responsibility or any change at all (see every police shooting video ever!), sometimes a 45-second video is all it takes to learn a lesson and make a difference.

A proposal for the 28th Amendment (Amendment XXVIII)

The Congress makes the following findings:

1. Firearms injure and kill people.

2. There is common agreement that the right to bear arms articulated in 2nd Amendment (Amendment II) of the Bill of Rights was given to the people of the United States for their safety and protection and the US Supreme Court ruled in 2010 (District of Columbia v Heller), that this right was not linked with service in a militia.

3. There are almost enough firearms for every woman, child and man in the country (1, 2) and, 47% of households (3) in the United States possess a firearm.

4. Firearms are a danger to the health and welfare of the citizenry based on their role in the morbidity and mortality of people, especially vulnerable populations such as children, women with violent partners, and people who live in poor, urban settings

5. Therefore, in light of this demonstration of the crisis in our nation, it is the sense of the Congress that prevention of injury and death is a very important government interest and the policy stated in section 6 below is intended to address this crisis.

6. As of February 1, 2013, there will be a moratorium on the sales of ALL firearms in the United States. This moratorium DOES NOT infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms as granted them by Amendment II in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States and supported by the US Supreme Court.

(1) The Congressional Research Service, estimates there are 310 million firearms in the USA (Gun Control Legislation, William J. Krouse, Nov 12, 2012, p. 8)

(2) The US Census estimates that there are 314 million people in the United States (2012 estimate).

(3) Gallup poll on October 26, 2011

I grew up in a family that goes places. My Jamaican parents met and married in London and raised my younger sister and I in Britain, Jamaica and Canada and now she and I live in the USA. My aunts and uncles and cousins are fortunate enough to be able to connect no matter how far apart we are. And like so many people I have friends and family scattered about the planet who I dearly love and thus love to visit.

I’m also a wanderer. I’ve always been one to go to foreign places — whether domestic or international — on my own and on a whim and on a dime. And as a remote worker, who is always on the hunt for a travel deal (thanks to Skyscanner, Airfarewatchdog and The Flight Deal), I am bounded only by my teaching schedule as to what day I get on that plane or take that train, bus or automobile.

But as someone who is a die-hard greenie I feel conflicted about the impact of my travels on the environment. I am a yellow/mellow — brown/down, dry my clothes on a rack, recycler and composter, glass instead of plastic, organic, locavore, Sierra Club-member kind of greenie. I love being out in the great outdoors. I kayak and camp and sail and hike and stand up paddle board and even got certified as a scuba diver. So I care about keeping water clean because I like to be in it. The trees matter to me because I love seeing them, being among them and I like how they clean my air. I recently gave up my car, and am a huge fan of uberPOOL, but it doesn’t mean I never drive. I still need a car to drive across Montana to get to Glacier Park after flying on a plane that pollutes.

So how do I reconcile my love of travel and my desire to care for the planet?

First, I care about how I go. Some methods of travel have been shown to be more destructive to the planet than others. Cruise ships have been maligned for dumping sewage into the ocean and generating tons of garbage, though they have been taking steps to change that image. They also generate lots of garbage and the impact of dumping thousands of people into a city for one day has caused cities like Venice to fight back with regulations that limit how many ships visit the city. Planes also pollute and I wince when flight attendants don’t separate the garbage they collect. As much as possible I use public transit while on the ground (I recently gave up my car) and when I’m not in the air I try as much as possible to ‘live green’ in an effort to ‘net-zero’ my travel carbon footprint. Speaking of footprint, so much of my traveling involves walking as it’s the best way to explore a locale. It’s also a great way to burn off the calories I collect from sampling the food.

2. I care about where I stay. I choose eco-friendly places as much as possible. I like hotels that brag about how they care for the planet but these days I’m mostly at Airbnbs so no housekeeping for me. When I do stay at hotels, I skip the house-keeping and re-use my towels and glasses.

3. I minimize my waste. I drink tap water as much as possible to limit my use of plastic or glass and if I have the choice I choose glass or cans. I bring my own tote bags to carry my purchases.

4. I eat local. Enjoying the food of a country is one of the joys of being there. So buying imported food runs counter to that. This also means that if I’m inland I opt out of seafood. And when buying food I prefer to buy unpackaged and as close to the food supply as possible.

5. I buy souvenirs made from local and sustainable materials and follow local laws about what is legal to buy and transport out of the country.

As a frequent traveler and digital nomad I have to own the negative impact that my flights have on the planet that I love so much. And I know there is more that I can do to assuage my environmental conscience as I wander about the planet. One of those things is to choose airlines that best suit my tree-hugging sensibilities, so I am doing research in that area.

Ultimately, I am only one traveler and the little I do is not enough to make a big impact. But my hope is that by engaging in conversation with other travelers, and advocating with vendors to do more, travelers will become more conscious of the choices they make, and the impact they have on the environment as they roam around the world.

1. AVOID CRUISE SHIPS

Places like Santorini find it challenging to manage the daily infusion from ships and the infrastructure challenges (water, sanitation etc) that they represent. (If you’re going to Alaska, you are forgiven as there’s no other way to see much of it). Cruise ships are the biggest tourism offenders in destroying our natural resources — the very same ones you go to visit on their ships. The volume of waste they produce (and dispense of in the water!) is phenomenal and in general, their impact on host sites skews the economics in their favor (i.e they discourage guests from buying from locals and encourage them to buy from cruise ship approved vendors). Furthermore, they significantly change the local culture when they disembark thousands of people in one place at the same time for no more than a few hours.

2. AVOID ALL-INCLUSIVE RESORTS.

Some travelers like the idea of paying for everything before they leave home. They also like not having to do the research of where to eat and what activities to do by having it all in the same place. However, all-inclusive resorts usually have no connection to their locales, have very little economic impact on local communities (other than providing service jobs) and usually puts the local economy at risk by sucking in all the money (why leave when you’ve already paid for your meal and activities?) and sending it back to their home country or tax haven.

3. GO LOCAL.

Buy your goods and services- hotel, food, travel & souvenirs - from locally owned businesses. Scared of eating local? Buy/Eat it hot and fresh. Spread the wealth. Build the capacity of people and communities worldwide with your travel budget, no matter how small it is. You will contribute to the growth of sustainable economies that have an impact throughout the supply chain.

4. LEARN THE LOCAL LANGUAGE.

Learning even a few words of the local language shows goodwill. If you learn a few basic words/sentences (‘travel fluency’), you will find your experience to be less stressful and more enjoyable. Hello, Goodbye, Please, and Thank You are enough to go a long way in going local, being a great guest and making new friends. But learning a little more will help you order the food you dreamed of eating and help you find your way.

5. BE A GREAT GUEST.

You are a guest of the country so act in the way you would want a guest in your country to behave. Be polite. Don’t litter. Learn about and respect the local customs. You don’t have to like everything you try but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s no good. Sure it’s okay to share the good and the bad when you return home but focus on the positive and spread the good word.

6. MAKE A FRIEND.

You traveled far to get to know a new place but everywhere is better when you know someone there. Yes, you may not know the language and they may not know yours well and you are going to leave very soon but getting to know locals where you are foreign gives you insight into the culture but also builds bridges to new experiences. Get to know at least one local person that is not serving you or are paid to be nice. Knowing people who live in foreign places makes the world smaller in meaningful ways.

In full disclosure, I too have created and supported such local, community-based initiatives (Maama Omwaana in Njeru, Uganda) at the invite of a Ugandan community to which my child belongs. I struggled with my role as ‘expert’ that seemed to have been granted as much for my learned ways as for my foreign status. I did not want to practice what Bill Easterly described in the title of his book as ‘The Tyranny of Experts’ and tried hard to make myself increasingly unnecessary until I was. That the local initiative grew to national action, with the support of the White Ribbon Alliance, has provided some salve to my wounded and conflicted professional identity as community organizer and public health professional.

Social Policy and Poverty

The solutions that brought the US and the EU to ‘manageable’ levels of poverty (and the sarcasm is dripping from this statement as the degree of poverty in the USA and UK is far from acceptable) are a good start: government-funded healthcare, investment in a good education system that starts early and ends with a useful qualification, other necessary infrastructure such as roads, individual and industrial waste management and clean water, and a decent wage. I would argue that the money spent on a dysentery vaccine could go much farther if united with the various initiatives to get people clean water, which would make a dysentery vaccine null and void.

Capitalism as ‘Solution’

It is a sad, sad story that clean water is widely, readily and profitably provided by Coca Cola, whether in fancy flavors of Fanta, or in containers with the classic red/black product logo known in every cranny of the universe, or the ‘purified’ H2O in their everywhere-present Dasani bottles. Why Coke has a chokehold on clean water is a much better question than asking some poor woman about where she wants her well or giving her some ‘innovative yet simple’ gadget to filter the crap she and her daughter(s) must go miles to fetch. (And of course there is the microloan to make it a microenterprise for her to sell said gadget to her friends). It is also a sad commentary on our own efforts at managing waste that we dump such waste unto those who can’t afford to say no, whether at home or abroad.

The emphasis on individual or local community based solutions to national and international problems created by the same rich people who want to shine their ugly metal by donating some of the funds they earned through rampant capitalism and tax-dodging (through off-shore shenanigans and eponymous grant-giving enterprises), will always be broadly ineffective.

Welfare States

I am not suggesting that every country can be the idealized model of Sweden and the rest of the fabulous nanny states that are Scandinavia. However, basic needs can be met without serving pre-schoolers breakfast on white tablecloths with proper cutlery. Denmark may be forward-thinking and smartly self-serving in providing not only free tertiary education, but a stipend to make sure one can eat and house themselves without graduating into poverty (more poverty than the guy in the hut because his negative cash flow is likely to be much lower than the newly minted college grad of the UK or USA), but they need not be alone. The price of a college education need not equal the downpayment on, or full price of, a house (depending on whether it’s Birmingham, Alabama or San Francisco, California).

Human Rights and Social Welfare

There is a widely-translated document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which Eleanor Roosevelt led the charging in writing that was adopted by many countries in Paris in 1948, and many more countries since then. If instead of asking poor people questions about their lives (they’re happy even though they’re poor!), and offering them up all manner of ‘innovative’ ‘solutions;(because I suppose what worked for us wont work for them), we started by providing people with the most basic of rights to which the UDHR said that we all deserve, then the question of poverty would be less pressing. If countries would ‘clawback’ that which has been ravished from the bowels of Angola, Nigeria, the ‘stans’, the Congo etc ad nauseum, and provide these basic rights to decent housing, food, hygiene, education and a living wage, then we could stop poking and prodding poor people as if they are a species newly discovered.

The Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601 began an approach towards poor people that in places like the United States has not far evolved. That which the Otto von Bismarck initiated in Germany in the late nineteenth century is still not provided in the USA in the early 21st century. It doesn’t take a genius or some Ivy-housed researcher to understand the basic starting point on which all human endeavour should be founded. Neither does it take randomized controlled trials to know that clean water and a way to get rid of human waste would solve a whole lot of global health problems.

Researching the Rich

The issue is who do we think have the answers. And I propose and would strongly argue that the people who create and maintain systems of inequality, exploitation, discrimination and exclusion are the people who have the answers to the problems created by these conditions. And that IS NOT poor people.

Instead, let’s ask the Forbes 400 how they feel about their wealth. Or perhaps some of the 1,645 billionaires that Forbes says controls $6.4 trillion dollars could spend an hour or two on a questionnaire. Let’s ask them how they feel when they pay wages they know remove the dignity of life from their workers. Ask them to explain why their capitalism should be subsidized by the government through social welfare programs to the working poor they employ. Ask them how they feel to have pulled the lever of internet IPOs and won the Silicon Valley jackpot. Perhaps we can run workshop that give the obscenely wealthy strategies for sharing that which they took, by luck or design, and teach them how to learn to take less and give more. Arguably it could be more socially beneficial than trying to teach poor people — as Tupac would say — “tryin’ to make a dollar out of fifteen cents’.

If the people who settle themselves so wonderfully in the money/power fest that is Davos spent just a few minutes in conversation about collaborating on bringing pipes to South Asia the way they find a way to get minerals out of the Congo, perhaps all that poking at poor people will abate and we can live in a more just and humane world. Instead we are stuck with their eponymous foundations that live on forever as their glorious legacy while their offspring drown in their wealth for generations.

But I suppose since that is about as likely to happen as ice in the Caribbean, then we can all fall back on our prestigious documents that prove our intellect as we dither about on planes, trains and fancy automobiles changing the world one village and one family at a time. If we settle for that then we deserve broken backs as we fall.

We study how the poor shop, what they eat, what they drink, how fat they are, how (un)educated they are, how much health care they (don’t) get, how they (don’t) parent, and how a wide range of social, political and economic factors interact to influence their patterns of behavior.

Given that the poor have been studied for more than a hundred years and are not responsible for their poverty, and that poverty is a result of social and economic policies and systems, the objective of studying the poor or poverty seems unproductive. For example, Charles Booth’s study of the poor in East London in the late 19th Century has findings similar to recent studies of the poor of East London. Finding that poverty did not change should not be surprising if the system that creates vast swaths of poverty: capitalism and social/political neglect, have not changed. That we are fascinated by the increases in inequality after creating systems that create such inequality makes us seem out of touch with the ‘real world’ outside of the towers of ivory.

Through our ‘engagement’ with the poor and with poverty, academics have implicitly and explicitly made poverty, and especially the poor, the object of our inquiry and therefore the focus of our interventions. There is something inherently ‘perverse’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘puzzling’ about the behaviors of the poor that inspires intellectuals of all stripes to spend lots of time writing grants, seeking out ‘controlled and randomized’ samples (or more likely samples of convenience), and doing complicated qualitative and quantitative analyses using sophisticated software to find out wherein lies the problem of poverty and how we can change the behaviors of the poor to make them less poor or more ‘functional’ within their poverty.

In the global arena, economists are leaving the theoretical equations of the classroom to test their ideas in the real world (see the books More Than Good Intentions, Poor Economics etc). Using localized research projects, these economists from Yale and The Poverty Action Lab at MIT seek to find ‘the answers to poverty’ by comparing how samples of poor people respond to different ‘aid’ scenarios. I will not deny the fascinating results of these studies, but the power dynamics of the ‘lab rat’ experiences that poor people must endure at our expense in the production of knowledge, leaves me queasy; despite all the very careful ethical standards that are in place.

Our extensive studies of the poor goes against the justice principle of the 1978 Belmont report that defined ethical standards for protection of ‘subjects’ in research. Academics put undue burden of research on the poor because the benefit to the poor is hard to justify the more we study them and the longer they remain ‘poor’ as mobility upwards slows down and the top 1% get increasingly wealthy. Perhaps we should study the rich in order to benefit the poor. We know a lot about the poor but it is hard to say how much ‘new’ information we gain about poverty/the poor with each new study, or how much poverty alleviation has happened as a result of the waves upon waves of various methodologies and strategies we have employed in the study of individuals who are poor.

The Problem is NOT Poor People

The problem is not poor people. The problem is poverty. And there is no way to ‘find answers to poverty’ by studying poor people as they are not the creators of their demise. However, as people with power, we have chosen them as the ‘object’ of our research (though ‘partners’ is a more trendy notion — and lofty goal — I hesitate to tarnish the meaning of the word by using it in this context). We do this because it is challenging to find a sample of the top 1% to study in the same way that we study the bottom 1%. How fascinating it would be to find out about how the wealthy give to charity, pay their workers more, consume less, vote in a particular way, their savings patterns, their inheritance patterns, their parenting, consumption of pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs, their romantic relationships, their residential patterns etc. etc. However, the wealth and power of the rich insulates them from being subjected to the querying minds of academe. The Center for Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University was created several years ago in a groundbreaking move to study wealth and inequality and yet it still identifies poverty as the first item in its list of research interests.

Leave Poor People Alone

I think it is time to leave poor people alone; to use our power to protect them from our insatiable curiousity about their lives through actively fighting with them for social policies that raise their standard of living and education and gives them more access to resources and power. Replicability may be a founding principle of science but after a point we move to redundancy. If we still feel the need to ask questions of the poor, perhaps we can let them guide the way. This means we give up our ‘intellectual superiority’ and become servants to the poor, asking the questions to which they want answers. This may mean less articles for me to review for lofty (and not so lofty) journals but it may mean that more of what we write gets read by more people, and more of what we read educates us in a meaningful way that makes social change possible.

Picture from Grandmother’s March 2012, sponsored by St Francis Health Services of Njeru, Uganda

Fall is here and students are back in the classroom and free speech is back on the agenda.

Just a few weeks in and already the hottest topic on campuses across America is free speech. In particular, my alma mater — the University of California, Berkeley (UCBerkeley) — is at the heart of the controversy to bring ‘conservative’ speakers to campus in what is being billed as Free Speech Week. It can either be seen as ironic, or a full circle revisit, that UC Berkeley is in this place, given its role in creating the free speech movement which grew out of a series of protests during the 1964–1965 academic year. It is now focused on right-wing ideas while back then it was focused on the protest speech of the left. It was as a place for radical ideas that I got to know most about UC Berkeley as a young girl growing up in Jamaica, and one of the primary reasons I chose to attend. The flood of articles that focus on the issue of free speech in the academy almost seems reminiscent of the McCarthy era, when the smallest of infractions against what McCarthy considered to be ‘American’ values could ruin one’s career on campus, in Hollywood and in society writ large. (For further exploration on how speaking about politics at your job can get you fired click here).

Academic Freedom and Free Speech

In a document titled, Academic Freedom: What it is, what it isn’t and how to tell the difference (John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, 2009), academic freedom was defined as ‘the freedom of scholars to pursue the truth in a manner consistent with professional standards of inquiry’ (p.4). They note that as a first amendment right it applies only to scholars in public institutions because it protects against “illegitimate governmental action or state law”. The author of the document further states that though the Supreme Court supports the idea of academic freedom it has not established clear criteria for its application, and that due to a 2006 ruling it has allowed lower courts to rule in favor of schools that seek to restrict faculty speech that is within the execution of official duties.

As a member of the academy I find it abhorrent that anyone would want to stifle the discussion of ideas in universities. This violates the principle of academic freedom, beyond the legal protections provided by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Furthermore, limiting ‘exposure’ of students to only ideas that are seen as ‘acceptable’ in a particular context of time and space, supports an environment of censorship that also limits the learning of students. University is also a place where people learn to explore ideas and to propose ideas based on evidence and to go beyond to propose ideas that have yet to be tested. Creativity, innovation, exploration, critical thinking and learning rules of argument using evidence, are essential skills that define the university classroom experience.

I consider myself a ‘radical free-speecher’ in that I don’t believe that any speech should be stifled. (Okay, I agree that you shouldn’t yell fire in a crowded room but…). As a black woman, I’ve been called naive, stupid, a race/gender/queer denier etc because I believe that regardless of how someone may feel or think about me, they have the right to say so in a public forum. I believe that if ideas related to justice, peace, love etc cannot prevail in the face of discrimination, hate or ‘alternative truth’, then what good are they?

My teaching load has included courses on race, ethnicity, class and gender. I’ve also taught courses on social policy. These courses inherently invite a range of opinions and experiences and ideas about what the world is, what it should be, and what it will become. Because students are usually afraid to ‘offend’, it is often a challenge to get students to be intellectually brave and to use their imagination to propose innovative or radical ideas, whether on the left or right.

When I was a graduate student, the idea of tenure was sold to me as a way to protect free speech in academia. The logic being that if one had a job for life then they would feel free to put forth controversial ideas without the fear of losing their livelihood. However, that is no longer true. Several professors at all levels have lost their jobs in the past few years because their ideas were ‘offensive’ or inaccurate. In 2015, Professor John McAdams was stripped of tenure by Marquette University because of what he wrote in a blogpost. In 2017, Lars Maischak, an adjunct professor in history at California State University in Fresno, was removed from his teaching assignment because of a tweet in which he declared ‘Trump must hang’. Kevin Allred, an adjunct professor at Montclair State U. and Rutgers U. had his course assignments repealed. And in 2014, Professor Steven Salaita — a Palestinian American — lost a job offer from the University of Illinois because of tweets he made about the state of Israel. There are many more examples that can be found by simply doing a Google search of ‘professors who lost jobs because of controversial ideas’.

The response to this suffocation of ‘controversial’ ideas has led to the creation of several organizations that were formed to protect free speech in the ivory towers. These organizations include Academics for Academic Freedom — a UK organization founded in 2006 that creates a list called ‘Free Speech University Rankings’, California Scholars for Academic Freedom, and the Scholars at Risk Network. It also includes the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which was founded in 1915, and states that its primary goal is the protection of academic freedom.

Snowflakes and Safe Spaces

The notion of ‘safe spaces’ has evolved to the point where students demand to be ‘warned’ about ideas that may ‘trigger’ them. The backlash has been to call this generation ‘snowflakes’ — who are easily hurt and traumatized by anything that challenges their sense of self and identity. So widely has become the use of the term ‘snowflake’ that it has evolved from describing the ‘hypersensitivity’ of the millennial generation to having The Guardian newspaper declare it, ‘the defining insult of 2016’.

Dictionary definitions of a ‘safe space’ generally agree that it is a place where ‘a person or category of person can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm’. Granted, noone wants to be in a classroom where people are mistreated, the notion that a university classroom will have non-offending speech is asking a lot of professors to be able to assess, monitor and silence that which may constitute ‘emotional harm’.

Being ‘triggered’ is at the heart of the definition of what it means to be a ‘snowflake’. In the context of ‘safe spaces’ it is defined as an act that causes a ‘negative emotional response’ such as panic, fear, flashbacks etc. As a social work professor, it would be practically impossible to teach classes that do not create a ‘negative emotional reaction’ given the nature of our work with marginalized, disadvantaged and populations traumatized by violence, abuse, neglect, illness, war etc. The expectation of a ‘trigger warning’ when writing or speaking about such topics would create an untenable classroom environment. In the Fall 2017 edition of California Magazine — UC Berkeley’s Alumni publication — Berkeley’s incoming chancellor, Carol T. Christ suggested that, “Ultimately, the safe space is inside yourself and you have to build that kind of sturdiness for self-worth where you can hear hurtful things and feel assured in your own center that they’re wrong”. Acknowledging the complicated nature of the topic she suggests that it is one to be explored as a community to show that people can have respectful conversations even though they may disagree.

Interestingly, the campus reactions to the post-2016 presidential election revealed that academics can also be ‘snowflakes’ if their negative emotional response can be taken as evidence. Many campuses had faculty groups where people talked about feeling traumatized — basically ‘triggered’ — by the election and what it meant for the future of the country. A lot of time and effort was spent on how to make classrooms safe spaces for conservatives as students wrote private letters to deans and open letters to the public about feeling that conservative voices were unwanted on campus as a backlash to the election outcome.

Diversity and the Future of Academic Freedom and Free Speech on Campus

Ultimately, the heart of the issue is the willingness to listen to ideas that differ from one’s own and be able to learn not only about another way of thinking but also to clarify one’s own stance on an issue. The desire to live in an echo chamber where everyone agrees with you means there is no room for learning about difference. A recent study by John Villasenor — a UCLA professor and senior fellow at a Brookings Institution — on college students’ perception of free speech on campus revealed a lack of knowledge about First Amendment rights (too many don’t know that hate speech is protected) and an intolerance for voices that radically divert from their own.

It is ironic that often the very people — liberals and lefties — who push for diversity on campus have decided to stifle diversity of viewpoints with the premise that only their ideas warrant expression and opposing voices and opinions should not be heard. Yes, the world has been dominated with a particular perspective connected to whiteness and maleness and wealth and power, but dissent need not silence these voices in order for alternative ones to be heard. If there is no room on campus for divergent thought, extremes in ideology, critical thinking and intellectual exploration, then the notion that universities are a place for expanding one’s mind will no longer exist.

Photo Credit: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/16/wired-notes-silicon-valley-companies-are-starting-to-doubt-concept-of-free-speech/