How talking to college students changed my mind about safe spaces

As an alumnus, and a member of the Duke Alumni Association board of directors, I’d been following the highly disturbing series of events on campus: In April, an undergraduate hung a noose from a tree near the student union; in October, a Black Lives Matter poster was defaced with the “N” word; students of Asian ancestry have been repeatedly ridiculed and stereotyped. Then, in November, while Jack Donahue slept in his dorm, he told me, an individual entered and scrawled on a corridor wall with a black sharpie: “Death to all fags @Jack.” Donahue is gay.

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The university didn’t address the incident publicly for two days, and then dismissed the incident as “defamatory speech.” LGBT students saw it differently. “No, it was a hate crime against an individual, as well as a community, and should have been named as such,” said Tyler Nelson, the president of Blue Devils United, the student LGBT organization. Christopher Brook, the legal director of the ACLU of North Carolina agreed, “It certainly sounds like this event meets the Hate Crime Prevention Act definition of a hate crime.”

Donahue missed the town hall  to attend IvyQ, an activist conference of LGBT students, but I had spoken to him a few days earlier. I asked him if LGBT students felt safe at Duke. “No,” he replied without hesitation. Donahue had earlier told The Chronicle “hatred like this is exactly what keeps innocent victims of circumstance in the closet and queer people living in a constant state of fear.”

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Duke students living in a constant state of fear? Was this an exaggeration or a frightening new reality for many? Listening to them speak up one after another, I sadly came to realize it was the latter.

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