Do you feel safe on campus? Share your story

Is your campus a safe place?

That may be a hard question to answer, especially if you’re a minority. Your life may not be in danger, but there may be signs that your well-being is not as important as that of others.

Maybe it’s a professor asking you if you speak English – even though you were born and raised here. Or logging on to Facebook only to see pictures of fellow students dressed up like insensitive parodies of your culture. Or being told that you only got into school because of Affirmative Action.

Or hearing a woman on a different campus being blamed for her own sexual assault.

Some people call these incidents microaggressions, slights that may not be intentional, but can make you feel unwelcome or even unsafe. These are the thousand tiny paper cuts that, over time, can feel like a much deeper wound.

Other people say that anyone experiencing these slights needs to just toughen up, and that by talking about campus trigger warnings or microaggressions, we are raising a generation of “delicate little flowers.”

But everyone’s experience is different.

In a conversation with the L.A. Times, Jonathan Butler, the hunger striker who helped bring national attention to Mizzou, said that reporters should have focused more on the hostile campus climate.

So, we’d like to have a conversation about your campus climate. What has your experience been? We want to hear your story.

You can share your story in the comments section below, or, if you’d like to be anonymous, send us a message via this form.

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