ACResolution Interviews John Palfrey,
author of Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces
This Fall, MIT Press will publish Safe
Spaces, Brave Spaces, by John Palfrey,
Head of School at Phillips Academy in
Andover, Massachusetts, which is often
regarded as the premier independent high
school in America (Its graduates include
presidents, senators, representatives governors, and Supreme Court justices as well
as Julia Alvarez, William Sloan Coffin, Samuel F.B. Morse, Frederick Law Olmsted, and
Benjamin Spock.)
Before coming to Andover, Palfrey was
a member of the Harvard Law School
faculty and executive director of its Berk-man Center for the Internet and Society.
He chaired Internet Safety Technical Task
Force, focused on child safety online, and
also the Knight Foundation on information
in a democratic society. He has also Digital
Library of America.
ACResolution is honored to publish the
first pre-publication interview granted by
Mr. Palfrey.
ACR: The primary focus of your book is
the interaction between free speech and
respect for diversity. You mention in your
introduction that you had at first thought
of writing an article, which then turned into
a book. Was there a particular catalyst for
that first impulse?
Palfrey: No particular event. Just a sense
that in our day to day dealings at Andover
we were sometimes putting them at odds
with each other when in fact I don’t actually see them as at odds and in fact see
both as very important values for us to be
able to uphold. It’s more observing these
issues in a broader political context.
ACR: Do you see a continuity between
your work on building a free and safe internet, and on making as much as possible of
the world’s written literature online, and
your new life?
Palfrey: My intellectual interests and
scholarship are a through-put that runs
from the Harvard work to the Andover
work. Obviously it’s much more applied
here and there. The Harvard life was much
more contemplative and this life is much
more active and immediate, but the issues
that interest me continue to be related.
ACR: Can we begin with the central
terms from your title, safe spaces and
brave spaces, which seem themselves
to be contested in some ways. You define
safe spaces as “environments in which
students can explore ideas and express
themselves un a context with well-understood ground rules for the conversation,"
while the president of the University of
Chicago, in a passage you quote, refers to
them as spaces "where individuals can
retreat from ideas and perspectives at
odds with their own."
Palfrey: The key is what are those ground
rules? In my mind a safe space is like a
kitchen or a hearth in your home where
you gather, sometimes with people who
are closest to you and maybe most alike
to you, and where you know that there are
certain things that won’t be said in a way
that is particularly upsetting, and in a place
where you also know that you can safely
be yourself in a way that might be distinctive. My version is slightly broader in the
sense that I think a safe space is one that
might take on slightly different dynamics.
The paradigmatic one might be the LGBTQ
space or a Hillel in the context of Jewish
religious life, in that you can’t imagine that
Nazi sentiments might be welcome in that
environment, and a Jewish student can
go there knowing that that’s so, but you
also know that if you walk onto the main
thoroughfare in a town that you might
encounter such sentiments, which I think is
the context of a braver space.
ACR: You have no objection to groups
having spaces of their own?
Palfrey: I have no problem with affin-
ity groups and organizations that do bring
people together in these safe spaces. Not
only do I think they’re okay, I think they’re
necessary in this moment. A dorm might
be somewhat different. We’re opening an
all-gender dorm this year. If you can imag-
ine a dorm that would have all people of
one race, I think that would be a huge mis-
take, at least on this campus.
ACR: You also describe safe spaces in
two different ways, as “learning environments that approximate the world outside
academic life” and as “those learning environments in which the primary purpose of
the interaction is a search for the truth.”
Palfrey: I hope so, in a good academic
environment. The one way you might
pull them apart a little bit is that in a brave
space on a college campus you might have
ground rules that you probably couldn‘t
have in the context of a town square. If a
neo-Nazi group wanted to walk through
our campus, I feel that as head of a private
institution I can say no. The more provocative argument I make is that I even think in
a public institution you should be able to do
that, although the First Amendment would
probably say I’m wrong on that point.
If you’re looking for a tension between
those two descriptions, the point might be
that it’s a spectrum; they’re aligned, but on
a campus, especially where you’re dealing
with different ages, I would lean on that
work “approximate.”
ACR: So they’re similar, not equal
Palfrey: Yes.
ACR: You were at Harvard a few years
ago when the college asked incoming
freshman to sign what might be called a
Civility Pledge, which read as follows:
In the classroom, in extracurricular
endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses,
students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain
a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility. As we begin at Harvard,
we commit to upholding the values of the
