Five days ago I published a piece in The New Republic criticizing the proliferation of “trigger warnings” in college courses and assignments, something done largely at the behest of students. My view is that there could be no end to such warnings, for nearly anything can “trigger” students, in ways running the gamut from mere offense to full-blown traumatic stress disorder. While, as I said, professors should be sensitive to material that might disturb a large proportion of students, it’s impossible to take into account every student’s potential offense when presenting a course, or when calculating what material that might disturb at least one student. As Jenny Jarvie wrote in The New Republic last year, there’s no end to offense-worthy topics:
Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.” Warnings have been proposed even for books long considered suitable material for high-schoolers: Last month, a Rutgers University sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby say, “TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence.”
More important, there’s no evidence I know of that a student’s well-being is improved by being warned about “triggering”. Indeed, some have suggested that exposure to “triggering” material might be more helpful than avoiding it completely. In the absence of evidence, all I can do is echo Jarvie’s note:
As the list of trigger warning–worthy topics continues to grow, there’s scant research demonstrating how words “trigger” or how warnings might help. Most psychological research on P.T.S.D. suggests that, for those who have experienced trauma, “triggers” can be complex and unpredictable, appearing in many forms, from sounds to smells to weather conditions and times of the year. In this sense, anything can be a trigger—a musky cologne, a ditsy pop song, a footprint in the snow.
And indeed, a committee set up by the American Association of University Professors on trigger warnings issued a report criticizing the practice, recommending that students with a history of bad reactions seek counseling and therapeutic help before any classes:
Some discomfort is inevitable in classrooms if the goal is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered, and, more generally, expand their horizons so as to become informed and responsible democratic citizens. Trigger warnings suggest that classrooms should offer protection and comfort rather than an intellectually challenging education. They reduce students to vulnerable victims rather than full participants in the intellectual process of education. The effect is to stifle thought on the part of both teachers and students who fear to raise questions that might make others “uncomfortable.”
The classroom is not the appropriate venue to treat PTSD, which is a medical condition that requires serious medical treatment. Trigger warnings are an inadequate and diversionary response. Medical research suggests that triggers for individuals can be unpredictable, dependent on networks of association. So color, taste, smell, and sound may lead to flashbacks and panic attacks as often as the mention of actual forms of violence such as rape and war. The range of any student’s sensitivity is thus impossible to anticipate. But if trigger warnings are required or expected, anything in a classroom that elicits a traumatic response could potentially expose teachers to all manner of discipline and punishment.
Aaron R. Hanlon, a visiting professor of English at Georgetown University, soon to join the English Department at Maine’s Colby College, disagrees with all this, and has written a polite rebuttal of my piece, also in the New Republic. His article, “My students need trigger warnings—and professors do, too.” Although his argument seems a bit confused (it’s not completely clear whether he really thinks that we should retain trigger warnings, since he agrees with me that they’re infantilizing and could proliferate needlessly), he defends them on three grounds.
1. If students have concerns about “triggering” material, professors would be churlish to ignore them.
Trigger warnings are nevertheless important because no matter how knowledgeable and comfortable professors are with the intellectually and emotionally challenging material we teach, our students are real people with real histories and concerns. They do indeed want to be challenged—to be made uncomfortable by literature—but it’s our job as professors to do more than just expose them to difficult ideas. It’s our job to help see them through the exposure.
I don’t mean to say that we should become licensed therapists or trauma experts on top of our ordinary specializations, or worse, to pretend to have expertise we haven’t earned. But so long as we’re happy to evangelize about the truly disruptive and real life-changing possibilities of our subject matter, we also need to be prepared to teach that difficult and sometimes disorienting material responsibly and attentively, not just to cast out barbs of hardcore human expression while we watch our students puzzle and weep.
I don’t completely disagree with this, and with material that seems likely to disturb an entire class, including graphic violence, rape, and murder, it’s not amiss to tell the students beforehand that those scenes are there. Any novel about or description of the Nazi concentration camps, for instance, will be disturbing, and we can predict that.
But how can we predict whether a student will be disturbed by issues like ableism, corpses, insects, words like “dumb” or “stupid”, death, vomiting, injury of any sort, police brutality, mental illness, violence, dehumanization, sexist attitudes, class warfare, and even consensual sexual activity, hunger and thirst? Those are just a few of the many issues that have been the subject of trigger warnings. We simply can’t issue warnings for every potential “issue” in a piece of literature or art on the chance that one or more students might find something disturbing. I’m simply going to list, off the top of my head, six of my favorite books of fiction and movies, and see what trigger warnings might apply:
Dubliners: adultery, pedophilia, death
Anna Karenina: adultery, suicide
Crime and Punishment: murder, death, class warfare, hunger and thirst
The Last Picture Show: bestiality, prostitution, sexism, semi-consensual and consensual sexual activity, death, homophobia
The Godfather: violence, death, sexism, crime
Lawrence of Arabia: colonialism, violence, death, homophobia, class warfare, racism, hunger and thirst
You get the idea. Of course if you include nonfiction, including anything that involves war or violence or injury or sex, then the list expands considerably. This leads to Hanlon’s second reason that trigger warnings are useful:
2. The warnings actually expand the discussion about books and literature by relating the material to students’ lives and concerns. I find this implausible. But first let me give Hanlon some plaudits for his teaching: according to Ratemyprofessors.com, his reviews are superb, some of the highest I’ve seen. Clearly the man is a caring and effective teacher. That aside, I doubt whether it’s useful to drag into discussions the reasons why students find some material triggering. Here’s how Hanlon defends it:
An interesting byproduct of trigger warnings is that they prime a class for discussion. Students don’t just nod at “sexual assault in Ovid” and write it down; they begin to engage with an aspect of the material, they give signals about how they’ll be affected, they evaluate the warning in relation to the language and subject matter of the text (which they better have already read in preparation for the class!). A trigger warning doesn’t have to be an act of censorship or a straightjacketing of interpretation; it can be a starting point for a ranging discussion that ultimately challenges students’ points of view.
Given that the difficult and potentially triggering material we teach must not be abandoned because it’s timeless, provocative, germane, or simply canonical by accident of history—and given that a trigger warning can actually open up a discussion of material with which students have an initially low comfort level—we simply can’t dismiss student calls for trigger warnings. We have to take them seriously, not because literature (or life) needs a censor or students need to be coddled, but because being more acutely aware of how students are responding to challenging material is just better and more responsible pedagogy. It’s true that life is triggering and won’t usually come with its own trigger warnings. But students are in their seats in part to be better prepared for that reality, and it’s professors’ jobs to facilitate that kind of intellectual development.
But let’s consider what might happen: a student will be “triggered” because he’s been mugged, or a woman has been sexually assaulted, or someone who is hearing-impaired is offended by “ableism.” How will this relate to the “triggering” material itself? Usually, I suspect, it will involve personal testimony about someone’s experiences and feelings, things that may be only tangentially connected with the material itself. If someone who has been assaulted, for instance, is triggered by the pervasive violence in Cormac McCarthy’s novels, and tells us why, does that really open up the discussion and create a “better and more responsible pedagogy”? Or does it simply give students the opportunity to use the class as a therapy session, or to become the center of attention, or to vent?
I can, however, imagine some cases in which it could be valuable. For instance, the distressed relative of someone killed in Auschwitz might recount how her great-uncle was dragged from his home, stuffed in a railroad car, and then, on the platform at Birkenau, separated from his wife and children and led to the gas chambers. That sort of experience can help bring literature alive. But I doubt that this is the kind of discussion that will usually follow when we ask students to explain to the class why they find material triggering. (I’m not talking about students meeting privately to discuss material with the professors, something to which I have no objection. But of course, as Hanlon notes, we’re not trained to be therapists, and he also objects, as do I, to “sensitivity training sessions.”)
3. Finally, we need trigger warnings to protect the job security of itinerant academics who don’t have tenure. Hanlon argues that without trigger warnings, untenured or adjunct faculty could be dismissed for harming students’ psyches:
The unfortunate irony in all of this is that the legitimate concerns of professors like Coyne about the potentially infantilizing effects of trigger warnings on students have been expressed seemingly without connection to concerns about infantilized professors. Given that over 75 percent of professors at U.S. colleges and universities are contingent faculty—like adjunct professors—who are operating without the prospect or protection of tenure, one of the better arguments against trigger warning policies is that they provide a more straightforward path to dismissal for the contingent professor who innocently fails to pick up on a particular trigger.
Reluctance to trust an expert’s understanding of a text (and the implications of all its dark corners) is also infantilizing professors in a way that can impede student learning. Failure to pay contingent faculty enough money to work one job instead of shuttling between piecemeal work at two or three universities; failure to provide them with office space in which to have those difficult conversations with students one-on-one; and failure to support their pedagogical choices in the classroom all reduce the ability of professors to see students through difficult material. Arguing flatly against trigger warnings won’t make these realities go away, but arguing for better institutional support for faculty can improve the conditions under which trigger warnings become necessary by giving faculty the resources to be more supportive of students.
. . . The student call for trigger warnings at Columbia may be flawed in its recommendations, but it’s fundamentally a call for more thorough teaching. We can’t merely admonish the students; we must support all faculty toward the end of teaching intellectually and emotionally challenging material more attentively.
I’m in complete agreement with Hanlon about universities’ use of adjunct or temporary faculty as a form of intellectual slave labor. You wouldn’t believe how little highly-trained instructors make compared to tenured faculty. Often the adjuncts must teach at several colleges simultaneously just to make a living. It looks as if Hanlon himself might have gone part of that route, at least judging by his status as an adjunct assistant professor, though there may be other reasons for that status. But this argument for trigger warnings seems remarkably self-serving—and inaccurate. I seriously doubt whether universities oppose trigger warnings because it makes it easier to get rid of adjunct faculty! Here Hanlon seems to go off the rails, grousing about the general (and distressing) situation for many Ph.Ds, but a situation that’s largely irrelevant to his topic.
As for the Columbia students’ call for trigger warnings as a way to promote better teaching, I don’t believe that for a minute. Unless you construe “better teaching” as “teaching that doesn’t offend or disturb students”, the Columbia students’ letter was about one thing, pure and simple: identity politics. It is about the right to demand warnings or even censorship of challenging material. And that is a road to worse teaching, and to the displacement of academics into the realm of purely personal concerns.
Seems appropriate to this discussion
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2015/05/mac-or-pc_15.html
Insanity!!
On a slight tangent, it disturbs me that one of the main criteria on which profs are judged on ratemyprofessor is “easiness”! What kind of criterion is that? ( not to mention “hotness”). Also, the average grade always seems to be some kind of A. Back in my stone age day we were graded on a curve (15%A, 35%B, 35%C, 15% D&F combined). A’s were the exception, not the rule.
Are you perhaps British or Australian? In the US school system (both High School and University), its fairly rare for professors to limit the number of A’s to a certain percent of the class. The most common system here is objective (everyone who gets 90% right on a test gets an A), and if there’s any grading on a curve that goes on, its usually to lower the standard needed an A rather than raise it.
Well Merilee hasn’t answered and I don’t know her nationality, but that is precisely the system that I grew up with in secondary education in Britain in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Except ‘A’ grades were closer to 12% than 15%, IIRC.
Which was great from a selection point of view – if you had someone with an ‘A’ grade, you could be pretty sure that they were in the top 12-15% of their cohort for that subject.
The more modern “tick-box” grading mentality shows more about the teacher’s skill at pounding examinable points into their students than the relative ability of the students. Which may be useful if you want people who can retain and regurgitate log tables or lists of kings, but tells you not a lot about their comprehension or ability to adapt their knowledge to novel situations.
It’s one of the reasons we completely gave up on recruiting raw recruits for field work. The judgement of our guys on the job is much more reliable than a marking scheme devised in an office in an ivory tower by a bureaucrat.
Nope, I’m American ( though living in Canada and High Schooled in London and Vienna…) and the curve I referred to was at Stanford in the 60s. There’s something to be said for grading on a curve: if the prof makes the exams too hard a 60% could give you an A, and conversely, if the exam is too easy you might need 95 to get an A. I’ve seen other kinds of curves in which the median mark is assigned something like 75% and you counted up or down from there. I took a numerical methods course once I moved to Canada, and even though I had had a 95 average on everything pre-exam ( assignments, midterm) the exam was impossible and even though I scored the 2nd highest mark on the exam, I ended up with something ridiculous like a 75. No curving was allowed. I think the top mark was 80.
Marking/grading is a tricky business, as I know from 20 years of teaching High Scool Math in the Great White North, and now there’s all this pressure from above to give everyone A’s so that the A’s don’t really mean anything anymore.
PS. Back at Stanford, engineers in particular kept falling out of the bottom of the curve ( the bottom 15% of D’s and F’s)
I would probably not be as mathematically oriented as I am if my A-level maths teacher hadn’t been so hot. So, hotness is maybe a good thing. Although I am a very shallow and dreadful person.
I must admit too, when TAing labs in the past, I have given much more attention to attractive students, mostly female, but also males.
I will also admit to paying more attention to hot teachers. I think this is natural, not so much shallow or dreadful.
It can be both natural and shallow and dreadful. :-/
And sub
This kind of makes me think teaching seem overrated for lacking the very experience that trigger warnings are intended to convey (which, of course, somehow frightens teachers that their speech is being restricted if they must acknowledge or introduce subject matter regarding the real – rather than wordy – hostility of the world).
This kind of makes me think teaching seem overrated for lacking the very experience that trigger warnings are intended to convey (which, of course, somehow frightens teachers that their speech is being restricted if they must acknowledge or introduce subject matter regarding the real – rather than wordy – hostility of the world). If the teachers understanding of a subject omits actual responses to relevant events, then why give the subject matter or the teacher one’s serious attention?
Here’s the rub… to paraphrase Russell(or whomever(
“It’s triggers all the way down.”
On the origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Hanlon:
The problem is, that’s not a given. Jerry’s quotes from both Oberlin and the earlier Columbia show that the pro-TW side is, in fact, arguing that we should abandon this material.
In this respect, it seems to me that Hanlon is not seeing what the pro-TW side is arguing; he is painting them as more like him or more moderate than they really are. Straw-manning them, but in a charitable rather than an uncharitable way.
Exactly what I was thinking. He seems to be attributing the most benign motivations to the pro-TW side contrary to their exhibited behavior.
That just is not the case, not in my experience. That is an ideal that I truly wish were the case, but it isn’t.
I agree. I think Hanlon is ignoring the therapeutic origin of the term “trigger warning:” it was so people who had been victimized or traumatized could leave an area or skip material. It didn’t just mean “brace yourself.”
I’m ok with TWs as simply content information type warnings – but not in their form intended by some proponents.
A point: there are some cases (for variety of reasons) where people do get severe anxiety/PSTD from reading or watching a movie – they need a doctor/psychiatrist/help. Not TWs.
Me too, however the problem is that when they become applied to everything they lose their original intent as a warning. Their value and effectiveness is, in part, linked to their rarity.
So I can see how a professor who wants to give them would quickly reach this paradoxical situation: if I take every student’s TW request equally credibly and seriously, everything eventually gets labeled and the warning no longer helps students determine when they are about to encounter something unusually discomfiting. On the other hand, if I don’t take every student’s TW request equally credibly and seriously, some will complain that their voices have been marginalized etc. On the third hand (these are motie professors), if I try and use some external academic standard for what material is discomfiting, I will be accused of perpetuating the dominant cultural view of what counts as a legitimate complaint and – again – trivializing or marginalizing minority views.
Given those choices, I can understand why a professor would choose #3. You’re going to get complaints any way you choose, however with #3 you at least have some reasonably objective criteria to point to when your peers and your administration asks how you decided which books to issue trigger warnings about. You also don’t get yourself in the deep pit of questions about giving some student preferential treatment over others.
I think TWs are fine if they’re just a ‘brace yourselves’ sort of thing. I could have done with a TW before I saw Big Hero 6, because I’m terrible with heights, and in 3D, that film is bloody unnerving. But I’d still have gone to see it.
As Dom notes below, do you think they should also be given in Bible classes? You’d have to warn students about a LOT of stuff!
The trigger warnings for the bible would be about as long as the book itself (unless they went with something like ‘are you a decent human being? Then you might want to skip this one’).
Trigger warning that if you don’t believe in the inerrent truthiness of every bit obvious bullshit that infests every holy book ever written no matter how contradictory or insane, you will go to hell for all eternity and same goes if you don’t select the correct holy book!
I think these oversensitive twits want to be protected from any potential bad thoughts whatsoever and not have to deal with harsh reality, which can make it all the worse when something really bad happens to them.
You impute less repetitiveness to the BuyBull than it has. Their god is not particularly imaginative in his smiting.
I suppose theology classes have to warn the students that the bible contains rape, murder, war, ethnic cleansing, not to mention a petulant deity.
This reminds me how I had to read Catullus for O-Level Latin when I was 15/16. Our (female) teacher refused to translate ‘glubit’… I suppose this type of literature would be frowned on in the classes described above!
i had a shakespeare class where the teacher refused to interpret particular passages because they were “bawdy.”
shakespeare. bawdy.
of course, this was Texas.
i walked out.
i should mention this was a university.
I recall once when bored looking through a collected version of Shakespear’s plays (in the same way we teens used to look through Leviticus for dirty words) and coming on ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’. I gather its attribution is uncertain, but its references – such as I could decipher from the archaic language – were extremely un-PC.
Yeah, the US response to bawdy and explicit historical materials really shows how we are still, mostly, the cultural descendants of a bunch of uptight puritans.
and they double-down in the south.
Just to insert another consideration to this Triggering dialogue I would ask the following: Are college bound students in need of greater protections from the realities of life than the rest of society?
We seem to have no argument about taking 18 year old people into the military and after a short training period they can be sent off to some of the worst places on earth to fight or defend our interests. Just a few year ago this was a mandatory require (called the draft). Far as I know, 18 years is still the age of registration. Shall we have trigger exemptions for this as well or does it only apply to the college class.
Well I think there’s a legitimate social expectation that treatment as a college freshmen will be different from treatment in boot camp. The 18-year olds in question are “buying” very different products using very different social contracts, so they are fully justified in expecting the treatment to be different. To use an analogy: I don’t expect my fast food waitperon to be as abrupt or dictatorial with me as my boss might be either. Different social contracts, different expectations.
Having said that, I do agree with you that there is more than a whiff of classism in the situation where college freshmen 18-year-olds are complaining that they are not being warned about mythological rape scenes before being forced to read Ovid, while boot camp 18-year-olds are expected to go through, well, boot camp without much complaint.
I am just afraid that on some subjects such as this one, it gets framed as only applicable to the college environment and this is widely accepted. I went to college after military so I think about these things – safe places and triggering events and all of it. I do not recall a social contract in either institution but maybe I missed that part.
The guilt trip of the draft caused them to simply remove it and even caused the lowering of voting age to 18. I can’t see that either of these changes improved society at all. What an 18 year old is expected to endure should apply wherever he or she goes.
The ‘social contract’ language was figurative. The point is, the two experiences are expected by everyone (incoming participants and the people who run those institutions) to be different, and that’s okay. The difference itself is not necessarily a sign of any sort of unfair treatment.
I understand the figurative and I also said nothing about unfair treatment of one group or another. My purpose was to simply attempt once to remove this discussion from just about the four walls of education and view it from a wider angle. It is pretty obvious that almost no one really wants to do that. It is almost like 18 years old is only applicable to college.
Note: This class is about fiction, which means the stories are not true. If you have difficulty distinguishing between fiction and your own life, please drop this course and spend your time in therapy instead.
a very razor, that.
This is the primary contention I have with anyone who remains religious in light of what science now explains: those people voluntarily choose not to want to distinguish what they should know to be fiction from fact.
Actually, a fictional story can often have a description of a historical disturbing event – for example, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, or most books about the Holocaust.
What does our Rutgers triggering student and Ayatollah Khomeini have in common? They both wanted to trigger ‘The Great Gatsby’. See Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ for her description of the post-1979 Iranian revolution Tehran University Faculty ‘trial’ of Fitzgerald’s work. With friends like that who needs Khomeinis? x
Sub.
I wonder if, had Immanuel Kant been a student in a philosophy class today and been assigned to read David Hume, he would have complained that he should be excused from the reading on grounds that he would be triggered; that he should be allowed to remain in his “dogmatic slumber!”
A class assignment of 120 Days of Sodom should be fun to witness.
On a more serious note, this reminds me of the time I wrote to Germany’s Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (Germany’s media rating agency, notorious for its uptight and intransparent decisions) pretending to be a worried father who’s underaged son got an assignment of Goethe’s Faust in school, which I claimed contained pornographic scenes.
What came back was a long and serious response, politely explaining to me why Goethe’s Faust was not pornographic. It told me that 1) these people are quite well-meaning, even if detached from reality, and 2) they seem to deal with a lot of earnest nutjobs.
Seems to me “trigger warning” is used for everything between “material with which students have an initially low comfort level” and something that needs a diagnosis (“triggering” PTSD).
Only the latter case should be a specific serious issue in a school. So I had to dig some into a subject I know nothing about:
It is perhaps ironic that exposure therapy is successful. “The success of exposure-based therapies has raised the question of whether exposure is a necessary ingredient in the treatment of PTSD.[88]” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorder#Prevention ]
It is surprisingly common and unsurprisingly (since sexes respond differently to trauma, IIRC) sex-correlated: “The NCS-R estimated the lifetime prevalence of PTSD among adult Americans to be 6.8% (1). … Women (10.4%) were more than twice as likely as men (5%) to have PTSD at some point in their lives (4).” [ http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/epidemiological-facts-ptsd.asp ] It is also serious, see the Wikipedia article and its linked articles.
But is it the task of educators to be part of a therapeutic environment? Maybe the task is the opposite, to minimize the need for therapy by exposing students for material “with which [they] have an initially low comfort level”!
“Studies have shown that those prepared for the potential of a traumatic experience are more prepared to deal with the stress of a traumatic experience and therefore less likely to develop PTSD.[6]” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorder#Risk_factors ]
Pre- and post-exposure to “triggers” (but maybe not in an educational setting) seems both be useful to _minimize_ PTSD effects. FWIW.
Are ‘Trigger Warnings’ a step towards banning books? Once we’re able to lay a trigger warning on every page of a given work (Dr. Coyne mentions McCarthy, so let’s use the example of “Blood Meridian” – an intensely violent and brutal novel) how long until we deem that work bereft of any teachable merit if it comes with an a tidal wave of warnings? If we’re exempting students from being involved with certain works, we’re attaching a negative value to those works. Value judgments about a work’s quality aside, is this not creeping close to just writing off some of the racier works of literature?
Also, the last point in the linked article bothers me. If an untenured instructor is worried about backlash from triggering students, what reason would he or she even have to assign any triggering works? This, as I understand it, provides an incentive to just *not* teach certain things at all. Why put one’s end’s-meet in jeopardy simply to teach the Blood Meridians and Lolitas and Othellos of the world?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not disputing the potential trauma some students may be faced with or that the proposition of TWs should be ignored. It’s just that there is an uncomfortable and stifling direction that ‘trigger warning’ culture could so easily take.
Hypothetically they don’t have to be, but take a look at that Oberlin policy document: it suggests professors remove or make optional ‘triggering’ material. Its a nod in that direction.
I also think if you take the pro-TW side absolutely seriously, that’s where it logically must lead. If someone tells me that they face an existential threat or don’t feel physically safe when they’re made to read about a rape, and I’m supposed to take those statements sincerely, then there’s really only one possible, ethical, response: don’t read it. Don’t be present when we discuss it. I can’t respond “well be warned, but now you have to read it” to someone who just told me they face a threat to their very life if they read it! The only way I can think such a course of action is warranted is if I assume the student is greatly exaggerating their feelings, and that does them something of a disservice.
So I think we really have to take the approach that Jerry has recommended, and acknowledge that professors aren’t therapists. It is not their job to worry (overmuch) about such impacts. If a student is aware they have PTSD or similar strong reactions to materials they may come in contact with, it is up to them to seek the proper health care professional to deal with it, and its up to them to understand class curriculum assignments and such sufficiently well that they don’t take classes that are going to trigger them. In this respect, its no different from a person who faints at the sight of blood considering an anatomy class involving dissection: its really not the professor’s job to change the course material to suit you; its your job to figure out you probably shouldn’t take that class – and if you really must take it, its your job to figure out how to get through it.
And consider a scenario where it is widely to universally agreed, nay, codified in some sense… let’s call it a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Trigger Warnings (edition 5, say). Now it’s all clarified and above board. Students can’t be scandalized or harmed. Teachers and schools can’t be sued, etc.
Won’t it quickly regress to “What gives you the right to teach this material, knowing it is loaded with TW’s? Are you a sadist (nazi, commie, pervert, atheist, et al)?”
Next up, “What gives YOU the RIGHT to write such filth?”
Cue the pitchforks and kerosene.
And just watch how the ‘Manual’ grows and grows out of control, absorbing vast amounts of peoples’ time as they try to figure out the threshold values of each trigger and how it should apply to each and every work on the curriculum. Watch the growth of ‘safety’ committees, staffed with apparatchiks of no real talent or teaching ability, happy to have an opportunity to tediously analyze trivia and kill by a thousand pinpricks the spirit, enthusiasm and will to live of every dedicated teacher in the place. Watch them institute a ‘points system’ for determining which books should be banned – err, deselected, with spreadsheets full of complex formulae and hundreds of databoxes to be filled in by anyone foolish enough to propose adding a book to the curriculum.
When I taught micro more than 15 years ago I assigned ‘Microbe Hunters.’ I warned the class that they would encounter racist language, and racist and ethnic stereotypes.
These were an embarrassment to me as an instructor,but I felt that the history and science in the book outweighed these negative aspects. A student learning about micro should not come across the phrase, “There is a N. in the woodpile” without warning.
Re “the N word.”
I just watched Clint Eastwood’s movie Gran Torino for the first time a few days ago.
Anyone who has seen it knows that he plays an overtly racist character, who continually addresses and describes minorities in racial epithets.
Except, of course, to ever use the “N-word.”
E.g. Eastwood is in a bar telling an off-color racist joke about minorities “A Jew, a Mexican and a Colored Guy go into a bar…”
It just stuck out to me as such an obvious incongruity for this racist character to avoid the N-word, an obvious bending PC sensibilities.
I’m trying to think: what if the movie included Clint using the “N-word?” The whole point is that he’s clearly racist/bigot, that this is not a good thing, and much of the story is about him getting over racism/bigotry. Would people actually get upset if the N-word were used, and decide “this MOVIE is racist!” It seems to grant such little intellectual capacity to the audience if that is the rational shy away from the word given the context of the character.
Amusing/ironic thought: Clint the writer (as opposed to the character in the movie) is old enough that he probably did use ‘colored guy’. I know my grandparents did, and they would’ve been in their mid-90s or so now.
This list of “trigger-warnings” dropped my jaw.
It’s like watching the societal version of “jumping the shark.” Though the first sign for me was the mind-boggling rise of commercials for medicines, which now start with a brief description of the benefits, and which spend the rest of the commercial rattling off a horrifying number of potential side effects (“may cause stomach bleeding, thoughts of suicide…”) over images of blithely happy people strolling the lake shore. It’s like watching an SNL skit or Onion Article come to life and I never get over the bizarreness of this turn of events.
Anyway, about the triggering, as people keep saying “where does it end? And who gets to make that call? And haven’t you just opened the gates of to being criticized for suggesting any cut-off points of the “triggering” and “marginalization” claims?”
Student: I’ve read the list of triggers and mine isn’t on it – Thalassophobia, Fear Of The Sea!
Seeing my particular psychological fears ignored, which are part of my identity, leads me to feeling marginalized and unsafe. I’m going to sue for the harm you have caused me in marginalizing my fears.
Following me will be my friend, who has Agrizoophobia – a Phobia of Wild Animals.
Have you forgotten and marginalized her, or will she have to engage in protest to get affirmation in your list?
Oh, and here’s a line up of other people who will want to talk to you, to make sure their
trigger-points are included in any of your curriculum descriptions:
http://phobialist.com/
Let’s make sure everyone feels safe, right?
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. 🙂
In the spirit of “May Contain Nuts”, why not just preface all classes with the phrase
“May contain triggers for certain of the following conditions:” followed by a link to phobialist.com? 😉
I can’t wait until these delicate little snow flakes encounter the real world in business or grad school or just the grocery store.
My daughter told me about some of her encounters in NYC during her internship: It’s not like home dad!
I said, “Yep”. I told to take the summer job running the debarking machine at the mill – and they paid you.
I truly, truly would not want to trigger anyone’s PTSD experience. I do give warnings in class about things I think are likely to cause strong emotional reactions (e.g. photos of naked people or discussion of pregnancy gone badly). I think this is worthwhile, though it may be optimistic to think my classes were so vivid they were likely to trigger anything at all.
However, much of the noise about trigger warnings seems to be about triggering offense, not PTSD. That’s not in the same class at all.
I think this is an important point.
Similarly a warning that a film contains ‘flashing images’ is a health warning to those who are sensitive to such things, not a warning about content.
I am certainly sympathetic to the idea that non-tenured faculty (and faculty more generally in some places and fields) are ridiculously underpaid. But the argument quoted above seems to have nothing to do with the subject at hand …
As for it, then, as a first blush I would propose the following matters as draft sketchy policy at universities etc.
(1) Students have the right to discuss with instructors any material that they find upsetting and why.
(2) Instructors have the duty to listen sympathetically.
(3) Students should be free to also explore any relevant material on their own and be permitted to use this in their work subject to
(4) Instructors should have some say in vetting appropriate additional materials for student use. (E.g., “No wikipedia!”)
However:
(5) Students, as a rule, cannot be exempt from class requirements merely on grounds of content. (They may be genuinely exempt for other non-academic reasons; e.g., at a place with physical education requirements to be exempt because they are quadroplegic or whatever. These cases will likely be rare. But no “I can’t take phys. ed. because I’m a moslem woman!”)
(6) Instructors may use any material they can defend rationally as being topically appropriate and of relevant difficulty in their classes.
(7) Students should not disrupt class with their concerns too much. (The usual vagueness of allowing discussion, etc.) Instead they can and should be told sometimes to take the concerns to office hours., etc.
if we’re reading say Ovid, I think it’s prudent for a professor to give the class a heads up about rape passages and condemn it before moving on. Rape is probably a bigger trigger than race of colonialism given that it happens so much on college campuses and is usually a more traumatic experience than, say, a single racial slur.
I agree with sedgequeen about the offense vs. PTSD distinction.
“Things Fall Apart” needs a Trigger Warning? My son read this book last year as part of his literature curriculum – when he was in 8th grade!
My son attends an international school in an African country. Half the students in his class were African. They didn’t need trigger warnings.
Of course, in 4 years time when they enter University in Europe or North America and get brainwashed by post-modern academics teaching post-colonial studies, the will problem suffer post traumatic stress disorder.
There IS some cultural dependence: in cultures with different sexual mores or rules about the appropriate use of violence, people are going to be upset by different things. Having said that, it doesn’t make the feelings of traumatized westerners any less real merely because some other culture views what we get traumatized about as normal behavior. I don’t think the issue here revolves around whether someone “ought to be” traumatized by some event or not; that’s not really a judgment anyone can make (and even if we make it in our heads, its kinda useless to say – it accomplishes nothing). The issue here revolves around what you do with someone who you take at their word to suffer some level of stress or trauma when exposed to some literary content. Do you have any ethical obligation to accommodate them? If so, what’s your obligation? Or does it generally fall on them to figure out how to deal with it?
I find all this stuff pretty improbable. This is the Internet generation, which for good or ill has probably had more (at least passive) exposure to the seamier side of existence than any generation before it, with wall-to-wall pornography, streaming movies, 24-hour news, social media (which are stuffed with gratuitous verbal aggression). There may be sheltered souls in the student population who have avoided such exposure, but I suspect that the percentage is small. And yet they are claiming that they need to be protected from potentially traumatic material, lest its content overwhelm their fragile psyches. The point about art, to paraphrase Aristotle, is precisely to arouse “pity and terror” in safety, because it is not happening to us! Some people are completely unmoved by fictional events, be it in literature, theatre or film, others can have very strong emotional responses (I am one of them). But believe it or not, it doesn’t kill you to have strong emotional responses.
It’s as if these robust young people are competing to be the kind of caricature you find in Jane Austen or Dickens, the person who suffers from “nerves” and and is subject to “fits of the vapours” at the slightest disturbance to their equanimity.
Of course, there will inevitably be a small minority which, because of bad experiences, is actually “triggered” by the content of a work of art. However, I’m a psychotherapist by profession, and have worked with many people suffering from PTSD and anxiety disorders of a sometimes crippling nature, and I would say that very few of them were triggered by fictional content. True, former soldiers tend to stay away from violent movies (in which the triggering factors tend to be the noises associated with a lot of modern action movies), but many clients find solace in the sense of shared experience that comes through reading. The triggering factors for real sufferers of conditions like PTSD are, as Jerry writes, very varied, but most of them come from the real world, not the world of the imagination.
“Anna Karenina: adultery, suicide
Crime and Punishment: murder, death, class warfare”
Hmmmm… come to think of it, if any university really does insist on issuing trigger warnings I believe that the following warning is absolutely compulsory:
The Bible: Racism, sexism, violence, incest, sodomy, slavery, bestiality, prostitution, death, homophobia, adultery, tribalism, paedophilia and irrationality
And genocide. I’m not sure genocide covers killing everyone on Earth apart from a floating zoo keeper and his family.
There shall be no dissing Cormac McCarthy (all hail). If an academic institution restricts any of his works, it shall be doomed to an ignorant future.
Let’s all just stop listening to Heavy Metal or Alternative while we are at it. Clearly the root of all violence in modern civilization. Good grief people, don’t get me started on bikinis: clearly the cause of rampant rape across the globe. This will only end with the ants rising above our species as well drown in our own offenses.
1. Universities are businesses.
2. Profs are workers.
3. Students are customers.
4. Administration is management.
When a single customer complains to management, management protects its own interests by increasing regulation of workers.
It’s called customer service.
The capitalist efficiency we always wanted for the university is finally here. We should be overjoyed.
I cannot take “trigger warnings” seriously.
(1) The people who promote it invariably turn out to be loopy postmodern intersectionality identitarians (“social justice warriors”) who are just concerned about their own status. Those who request trigger warnings want to tell their peers “look how much I care!”. That alone is not enough, of course, however
(2) Usually whatever they promote is far detached from reality. Nobody was ever triggered by a double entendre in a confined space (e.g. asking for coffee in an irish lift), and likewise there is probably nobody ever who has a panic attack from reading Mark Twain.
(3) The ideological reasons are utter bollocks, for example the dichotomy of privilged and oppressed. Contrary to the alleged aims of such people, they promote a transactional parent/child view of the relations between identity categories (women are helpless children, men are controlling parental, feminists are patronizing/protecting), and that should be rejected, too.
(4) It can be expected from students to have a general idea what kind of content might be in the material. How often does it actually happen that you are asked to learn about Nazi Germany and halfway in you learn about death and genocide out of a sudden! Who knew!
(5) As noted above, triggers don’t nearly fall into some categories and …
(6) the purpose of trigger warnings, as the rest of the social justice warrior project are about authoritarian control of language and culture, based on the view that by taking control of culture, humans and human nature can be shaped and changed.
Hi Aneris,
how about “Trigger warning: Social justice theory”?
PS: Ich komme gut voran.
Do you start every lecture with a voice over ‘some of this material may cause offence, your discretion is advised..’
Today we are going to have a AO (Adults Only)
discussion.. (see who leaves that session)
All courses at this University are rated for your sensibilities, please choose carefully.
‘Sign the disclaimer before lecture commences’
and We have a special deal for “lecture therapy’ today, two sessions for the price of one.
All credit cards accepted.
Taking in the general premise and counter arguments of the Prof. post I’ll mock this absurdity until common sense prevails.
Oh, and I wonder how many of these are the sort of people who would insist that horrors such as the Holocaust could not possibly have happened or that global warming is a myth perpetrated by evil people who want to make everyone feel bad.
Madness looms…
Please tell me this is not real:
“Feminist conference says clapping ‘triggers anxiety,’ asks attendees to use ‘jazz hands’ instead…”
Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/24/feminist-conference-says-clapping-triggers-anxiety/
And, of course, note that trigger warnings themselves can be triggering! The “Geek Feminism Wiki” entry on trigger warning actually contains a trigger warning of its own content: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning
Oh boy…
Holy fuck!
(Trigger warning: Bad language, potential blasphemy, sexual references, religious references, adult themes, disrespectful mode of expression, potentially controversial comment, … )
(That comment was of course, directed in the most offensive and triggering manner possible, at Oberlin College’s directive.)
Plus–revealing the mayhem ahead can significantly alter the effect of the book on a reader. If you’re told to expect a suicide, then when it happens it’s not nearly as shocking as when it comes as a surprise. We’re doing authors a disservice to give away important plot points before their works are read.
I remember being shattered when Beth died in Little Women; for days I was traumatized, and I read this book in middle school. Still, I am SO glad it was completely unexpected so that I did feel that way; it’s appropriate when children die…
Another thing–are art museum visits going to become a thing of the past? How many gripping paintings are macabre–esp. the religious ones?!
Macabre and/or salacious…
Oh yes – ‘trigger warnings’ in the case of literature / movies are also known as ‘spoilers’. Just imagine how popular they would be.
‘Easy rider’ – trigger warning: the guys get killed at the end.
‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ – trigger warning: Butch and Sundance (probably) get killed at the end.
‘Alien’ – trigger warning: ….
and so on
‘Gallipoli’ – trigger warning: the kid gets a bullet through his forehead in the end
‘The Killing Fields’ – trigger warning: a lot of blood runs down the stairs, and other bad things happen too.
‘The Untouchables’ – trigger warning: Nitty’s in the car
Life generally – trigger warning: some unpleasant things may happen and then you die.
Ha, ha! You & infinite have a knack for this…
Exactly the same reaction to Beth’s death by me, Diane. Probably summer before 6th or 7th grade and I can remember exactly where I was ( front porch of summer place in Penn mountains). Thank CC no trigger warnings and no censoring by my parents ( except for hiding their copy of Peyton Place:-)
Oh, yes, place memory, though I was just in my room in the triplex we lived in at the time. The only thing my Mom ever did to discourage me was to tell me I was spending too much time reading and that I should “go outside and play.” I was usually pretty successful at ignoring her.
Funnily enough I don’t remember being bugged to go out and play – guess I did enough of that with three brothers- but do remember said brothers getting POed when I read Catcher in the Rye in one sitting/lying in the bathtub the summer after 8th grade and they kept rattling the door handle. Fortunately we had another bathroom downstairs ( in DC).
…and yet video games which contain many alleged ‘triggers’ (Grand Theft Auto V, for instance) are merely protected by an age rating and some disclaimer in the small print. How come people being educated are being treated as such tender snowflakes?
I just finished reading J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. This could certainly qualify as a “trigger” book. But I think it’s an excellent choice for examining rape and adultery in a literary context. And there is a sort of redemption at the end too.
Disgrace is a fantastic, and disturbing book. There is a fine movie made of it, too, with John Malkovich. We saw it at the Toronto Internat’l Film Festival but don’t think we saw that got general release, which is a pit.
There’s a certain amount of moral ambiguity in it as well, at least that is what I took away from it. Or perhaps amorality. I think that a lot of American students would have trouble with that.
Probably non-American students as well, but moral ambiguity is usually what gives literature depth.
Wow, my horrible typing above: should be “don’t think we saw that IT got general release, which is a pity.”
Exactly.
How ironic that the same culture which created most of these problems in the past, now tries to patch them up with silly attempts! Surely future generations will lough with our utter craziness.