A lot of people (and, mea culpa, I’m one of them) have recently engaged in handwringing over the decline of freedom of speech on many college campuses, in a discussion amplified by high-profile cases at Yale, Princeton, the University of Missouri, and other colleges across the country.
Perhaps the recent incidents are indicative of a broader trend but it appears that, as of this spring, trigger warnings were far less widespread than news accounts would suggest. What do you CC people think?
I teach literature classes at a community college. My school does not require trigger warnings, and I don’t recall the topic ever coming up. I’ve read discussions about them in The Chronicle of Higher Education but mostly let the issue pass me by.
That said, for years I’ve considered it common courtesy to let my students know what they’re getting into on opening day. In January, I will say something like this: “I won’t tell you which book is which, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we will encounter some topics that might concern some of you. The most significant is sexual assault, but you won’t have to read anything very graphic for more than a few sentences. There will be some very brief scenes of domestic violence, but not many of them. One novel will be filled with a lot of swearing, but mostly words you can hear on network television. There will be two or three F-bombs.”
(So far as I know) I almost never have a kid drop my class because of the content warning. More frequently, it’s because they dislike something about ME, or we’re reading more books than they think they can handle, or a space opened up in a class they would rather take.
I have occasionally had a student tell me privately that she was a survivor of sexual assault and felt uneasy about a certain book. So we talk about ways of dealing with that that do not include giving up on the book. Generally, when we’ve finished with the book, they tell me the experience was a lot less horrifying than they’d feared and they were glad they’d stuck it out.
I teach Political Science at a large state university, very diverse. I’ve also taught at 2 other institutions (1 public and 1 private), and I’ve never been asked for trigger warnings, and many of my colleagues at other schools haven’t either.
I definitely think this is the media making it seem a lot larger than it actually is to increase ratings/readers.
I think a lot of recent discussion of this topic was triggered by an article in The Atlantic. I subscribe to that magazine because I find their articles generally enjoyable and informative, but they do have a weakness for hyperbole. In this case, they made it sound like colleges everywhere were being held hostage by sensitive snowflakes who couldn’t handle anything unpleasant in their lives at all. I suspect this isn’t anywhere near the case in reality.
The only trigger warning i’ve ever given in the college classroom was for a video that showed a good bit of spraying blood, because there really does seem to be at least some degree of aversion to gore built into all non-psychopathic individuals, for presumably sensible reasons—and even then it wasn’t so much a “trigger” warning as it was a “hey—this video shows blood, so if you’ve got a weak stomach you might want to be careful of that”.
Seriously, in my admittedly non-randomly-sampled acquaintance set in academia, trigger warnings are very, very rare. However, we tend to notice the unusual in some cases, and I’ve started thinking the handwringing over widespread trigger warnings stems from exactly that situation.
When I taught literature and film, I always let my students know when something uncomfortable was coming, particularly on screen. My educational institution had no written policy, but it was just common courtesy. I didn’t want any student to have a painful experience in my class.
@dfbdfb Your warning about blood is a good one. I’ve come across two people who are absolutely phobic about blood. A co-worker and I were discussing scheduling on-site Red Cross donation appointments. A person within earshot had to immediately get up and walk away. Even hearing us mention blood was too much for her. We didn’t think any less of her as a person. But it opened my eyes about how some people can’t control the fears that control them.
I also agree with @drewdane . Juicy headlines = more clicks = more money. Just look around at the direction this website has gone… smh
I agree that the media is overinflating things, and I also agree with a lot of the comments above - there’s nothing wrong with letting students know what they are about to get into, which is what a trigger warning is. “Trigger warnings” were originally supposed to be for students who might be suffering from PTSD or other mental illnesses that are triggered by memories of what caused the illness in the first place. You don’t want a combat veteran or a sexual assault survivor flipping out in your class - that’s not good for anyone.
“Trigger warnings” were not designed for students who simply feel uncomfortable discussing a viewpoint that they don’t agree with. That’s a misuse by the media.
What? I’m shocked. CC and the media making a much bigger deal about something than actually exists on college campuses?
Now if we can just get over the hook up culture myth…
I do give trigger warnings in my classes because we deal with intense issues like sexual assault, genocide, etc for very recent issues. As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I consider it just part of being a decent human being.