End ‘Safe Spaces’ on Campus

The Women’s Center purports itself to be a safe space on campus, but is it doing more harm than good?

The Yale Women’s Center is located in the basement of Durfee Hall on Old Campus. (Credit: The Buckley Beacon).

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Recently, the Yale Women’s Center has come under scrutiny by the Yale administration. According to the Yale Daily News, last December the Yale Dean’s Office offered the Women’s Center the option to either represent the political neutrality of Yale’s mission or become a purely student organization, rather than a campus-sponsored organization with a paid student staff.

The first question one should ask is what is the Yale’s Women’s Center? If you guessed a space to uplift and represent all women at Yale, you’d be sorely mistaken. Instead, according to a recent opinion piece in the Yale Daily News, the purpose of Yale’s Women’s Center is to advance a narrow political ideology and exclude anyone outside of it, even women. 

Indeed, members of the organization describe the Center as a haven for “intersectional community organizing” and “a launching pad for political action.” What does that so-called “intersectional organizing” look like? In the spring of 2024, the Women’s Center planned, and later cancelled, a controversial conference called “Pinkwashing and Feminism in Palestine.” Reporting by the Buckley Beacon revealed that the Center refused to answer student groups who questioned the event, leading to an investigation by the Yale Office of Student Affairs.

More recently, the Women’s Center has hosted the event “Unmaking the Carceral: Abolitionist Thought and the Work of Building a Better Future.” It’s unclear how this relates to women’s issues at all, beyond being a form of woke virtual signaling. 

Taking a step into the Women’s Center also immediately reveals its political bent; it is covered with left-wing slogans and pamphlets that dismiss pro-life advocates as “anti-choicers.”

Notice how these center-sponsored events and decor have little to do with the experience of being a woman at Yale, but do succeed in alienating all those just to the right of Zohran Mamdani on the political spectrum. Evidentially, the Women’s Center only advocates for a certain type of woman (or non-binary person). 

This is deeply unfortunate. On its face, having a Women’s Center sounds like a good idea. After all, women have fought hard to have a place at Yale, and the university is certainly stronger because of them. Yet by explicitly politicizing this institution, Yale’s Women’s Center fails to live up to its potential.

In further illustration of its political purpose, the members of the Women’s Center describe it as a “physical safe space for gender minorities.” The primary issue in this statement lies in the insistence on a “safe space.” A safe space is by definition a place “intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism, or potentially threatening actions, ideas, or conversations.” Judging by its programming and the confession of a former member that the Center is “prioritizing Marxism over women,” the Women’s Center has indeed achieved this goal. 

Yet this should frighten us all. Safe spaces, despite their name, are dangerous. In coddling students, they succeed in polarizing Yale’s student body and preventing opportunities for growth that come when ideas clash. When ideas aren’t challenged, they do not grow stronger. Notably, avoiding criticism or “threatening” ideas doesn’t make them go away. It just makes the members of said safe space unable to handle or challenge them. As is often said, the real world is not a safe space. 

So, in pushing for a safe space, the Yale Women’s Center ironically pushes for something that will harm the women who engage with it. They will come away less equipped to deal with the world and all of its challenges, having only been trained in progressive talking points. 

If the Yale Women’s Center were truly a place for women at Yale to meet and find a sense of community, I doubt anyone would oppose it. But it is clearly not that, and that’s something its members are unafraid to admit. It should hardly come as a shock to them, then, that Yale University, in its recent push for institutional neutrality and ideological diversity, and in an effort to promote the growth of its students, doesn’t wish to be affiliated with their political activism. 

Ultimately, the only question remaining is why Yale allowed the self-proclaimed “safe space” to receive university funding for so long.