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.