Safe Enough Spaces, by Michael S. Roth

I read Michael S. Roth's Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses with some suspicion and trepidation.  I am thirty years past my college experiences, with a son in the midst of it.  In the decades that have passed, I have, as an outsider, seen the deepening of leftist culture's grip on college life, and have wondered and prayed for my son's generation to be free from the grip of destructive liberal indoctrination.

Roth is president of Wesleyan University and while he seems personally quite comfortable with liberalism, he does actually provide a perspective that leaves room for other points of view.  I admit that I have come to accept the common belief, which Roth says is mistaken, that "campuses have replaced teaching and learning with indoctrination and political posturing."  But Roth does concede that "there is a serious problem of political bias on college campuses, particularly in the humanities and interpretive social sciences."

Roth wants campuses to be "safe-enough," existing and teaching with "tensions between flourishing and criticizing."  He celebrates broad diversity, even seeming to embrace affirmative action type admissions policies.  But while providing "encounters with different diversities" universities can't be "too safe--they must not coddle."

Based on what I read here, Roth sounds too liberal, politically and socially, for my taste.  We would find plenty of points of disagreement, I'm sure, if we were to sit around a seminar table together at Wesleyan.  On the other hand, I think I could count on him to teach my son's generation and to create a campus environment where conservatives and liberals and religious and non-religious alike can be challenged and taught without the "growing danger of orthodoxy and authoritarianism." 

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!