The silliness of 'trigger warnings'

11:41 AM, Apr. 22, 2014  |  Comments
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Universities are supposed to be demanding places. They should make students look in new ways at art, life, politics, love and war. And they should stand up for principles such as academic freedom and rigorous debate.

Sometimes they do these things. But too often they do not.

For all of their reputation for free thinking, universities can be governed by well-meaning, but stifling liberal orthodoxy.

The latest example comes in the form of the push on several campuses for "trigger warnings" - statements that advise students that a particular book or other work includes disturbing content that might trigger traumatic reactions in certain people.

For example, a course that included "Things FallApart," a novel by Chinua Achebe, might include a warning that it dealt with racism, violence and colonialism. Readers of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" would have to be warned of the suicide of a pivotal character. And a course covering Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" would have to warn students of the former's racism and the latter's anti-Semitism.

The practice began on the Internet, particularly with blogs dealing with such topics as violence against women and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In that context, the advisories are relatively harmless, though presumably someone seeking out blogs on rape or PTSD would know what to expect.

In academia, trigger warnings are another matter entirely. At best, they are silly. By the time today's students get to college, they've been exposed to all manner of sex, violence and depravity on the Internet, on TV and at the movies. It's hard to believe a significant number are truly shocked by something they encounter in a college classroom.

At worst, the warnings involve outright censorship. Until it had second thoughts and tabled its policy, Ohio's Oberlin College directed professors to remove triggering works from their courses if they did not contribute directly to learning goals.

Some of the policies would give students license to object to, or even skip out on, demanding subject matter. A resolution passed by the Associated Students Senate at the University of California-Santa Barbara calls on professors to excuse students from class, with no penalty, when objectionable works are covered.

Almost all forms of trigger warnings lend themselves to overreach, in what subjects they cover and how they are applied. According to The New Republic, the Oberlin warnings had covered works containing "racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression."

Students at Wellesley College, meanwhile, used the trigger warning concept to object to a statue of an underwear-clad man, calling it "a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault."

This is not to say that students shouldn't be able to complain about works, or that PTSD isn't serious. But it does mean that simplistic, coddling warnings are a terrible idea. Swadd-ling students in such niceties is no way to prepare them for life.


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