Rethinking Safe Spaces

When my roommate designated our dorm room a BGLTQ safe space by affixing a tiny square of fluorescent pink to our door, it troubled me. The “safe space” signs are a staple on this campus. However, by designating certain areas as BGLTQ safe spaces, we inadvertently imply that all other spaces, by comparison, are not safe for BGLTQ  members of our community. In a campus environment that is exceptionally diverse, every space should be safe for all students. Indeed, “safe space” signs serve as a potent indicator that we need to rethink the boundaries of spatial inclusivity on our campus.

Last year, the University established the Office of BGLTQ Student Life in the basement of Boylston Hall, garnering praise but also criticism from some undergraduate members of the BGLTQ working group that prompted its creation. Chief among the criticisms was a spatial complaint: Like the existing Queer Resource Center in the basement of Thayer Hall, the new BGLTQ office is underground. Its subtle location raises concerns about visibility from both the student and administration perspectives, prompting anxiety that the office’s location, below an academic building, hinders its ability to function as a welcoming and well-utilized social space for students, while seeming to send the message that administrators wish to quietly appease student concerns rather than offer a comprehensive response. In essence, does out of sight equal out of mind?

Of course, BGLTQ spaces are hardly the first of Harvard’s demographic-specific spaces to be relegated to subterranean levels. The basement networks of freshman dormitories play home to several spaces that serve cultural, religious, or social needs: For example, the Hindu and Muslim prayer spaces in Canaday basement. Centrally located in the Yard, these spaces provide functionality and privacy for the student organizations that occupy them, but remain effectively invisible to the rest of the student body. The use of basements becomes problematic when poorly visible spaces are meant to serve a large demographic, as evidenced the Harvard College Women’s Center, which is utilized by very few of Harvard’s more than three thousand female students, no doubt at least partially due to its location in Canaday basement.

Peer counseling centers, too, reside squarely below ground. Low-key basement locations rightly emphasize the confidentiality of counseling services, but these centers ought to be located in somewhat visible locations so as to encourage visits from both students who are hesitant to seek counseling and those who have not considered counseling but may benefit from it. With Room 13 nestled discretely near the laundry room in Thayer basement, it’s no wonder our campus culture continues to languish in the lack of open discourse about mental health.

The spatial misallocation of Harvard’s safe spaces extends from underground to far above entryways, and it proves particularly troubling with respect to spaces that support victims of sexual assault. Although each House trains a number of resident tutors to provide Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment support, leaving it up to the students and tutors to decide where to meet privately, few students are aware that another resource, the university-wide Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, is open daily to students for in-person assistance, in addition to phone and online support. OSAPR is located on the seventh story of the Holyoke Center, whose offices are rarely frequented by most undergraduates. The relative obscurity of OSAPR’s location especially disadvantages freshmen, because there is only one SASH proctor available to the entire class of 2016. Moreover, the spatial incongruity of OSAPR’s modest residence tucked away in an administrative building seven stories above ground level, in contrast to the thousands of square feet of multimillion-dollar Harvard Square real estate dominated by social organizations alleged to perpetuate sexual violence, reflects a stunning social incongruity on this campus. If the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response were as visible and centrally located as the final clubs whose convenient addresses help them monopolize many students’ Friday nights, perhaps the status quo of sexual violence at Harvard would be different.

Over the course of the next decade, the House renewal project will provide necessary amelioration through recognition of spatial needs such as gender-neutral facilities, at least in the residential sphere. In the meantime, spatial incongruities call for a campus-wide intellectual renovation of sorts. In order to decide how best to restructure our spaces, we must first restructure how we think about inclusivity on campus, especially by resisting the tendency to defer safe spaces to poorly visible locations in lieu of openly institutionalizing demographic-specific spaces. Only then will we progress toward a campus culture in which we might eschew the impulse to compartmentalize supportive spaces in the first place—a Harvard where fluorescent pink signs no longer need to exist. We must strive to foster an environment in which safe spaces are the norm, not the exception.

Tarina Quraishi ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator in Eliot House.