Opinion | I’m a Conservative Professor Who Opposed Safe Spaces. I Was Wrong.

Although I’m aiming for voluntary restraint rather than self-censorship, in practice some element of social pressure — and, thus, censorship — is probably inevitable. That doesn’t trouble me so long as these occasional acts of self-censorship actually widen spaces for the discussion of ideas by softening the climate of fear on our campuses.

Happily, no student has yet protested my class expectations — and I’m frankly not sure what I would do, if they did. But however my mix of class norms and guidelines evolve, they’ll grow up from experience, not simply downward from the abstract principles of academic freedom found in statements like Chicago’s.

Regrettably, too many on the right who advocate free speech have embraced a normless public square, one that celebrates transgression as an antidote to cancel culture. Of course, Donald Trump is the most prominent offender, as usual. From the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Trump mocked the expectation that his speech should be “presidential.” But other conservative apostles of free speech have reveled in transgression as well. Before a delighted crowd at the University of Houston, for example, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos told one protester something so coarse the Times won’t even print it. He said, “[expletive] your feelings.”

The right’s libertine impulse is driven in part by an American obsession with authenticity. This cult of authenticity — now fueling conservatism’s populist turn — says our public expression should be unmediated by social pressures. But public life — both in and outside our college campuses — requires inauthenticity.

For all their errors, excesses and harms, advocates of “safetyism” on the left rightly reject this culture of transgression because they understand that normlessness can’t be a foundation for any community, even a free one.

Before their Trumpian turn, conservatives more often presupposed that a free people needed customs, habits and norms that civilize and integrate them into the social order. It was a bedrock principle we called ordered liberty. Especially in this age of anomie, conservatives need to re-embrace that tradition by giving more thought to the sort of culture and social integration that’s required to create a community of truth seekers.

That community will require safe spaces in our college classrooms. So, let’s stop opposing safety and freedom. Instead, let’s elaborate and defend our own version of safe spaces. Truly free and open inquiry in our classrooms depends on it.