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Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm
By JENNIFER MEDINA MAY 17, 2014
SANTA
BARBARA, Calif.
— Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a
variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as
one Rutgers student proposed?
Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do
sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?
Colleges across the country
this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as
“trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or
see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms
of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.
The warnings, which have
their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at
the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where the student government formally called for them.
But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University
of Michigan, George Washington University and other
schools.
The debate has left many
academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense
and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they
say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to
challenge, not embrace. The warnings have been widely debated in intellectual
circles and largely criticized in opinion magazines, newspaper editorials and
academic email lists.
“Any kind of blanket trigger
policy is inimical to academic freedom,” said Lisa Hajjar, a sociology
professor at the university here, who often uses graphic depictions of torture
in her courses about war. “Any student can request some sort of individual
accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is
totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to
deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.”
Bailey Loverin, a sophomore
at Santa Barbara,
said the idea for campus wide trigger warnings came to her in February after a
professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had
been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by
the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have
been warned.
Ms. Loverin draws a
distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into
memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa
Barbara are veterans — and slapping warning labels on famous literary works, as
other advocates of trigger warnings have proposed.
“We’re not talking about
someone turning away from something they don’t want to see,” Ms. Loverin said
in a recent interview. “People suddenly feel a very real threat to their safety
— even if it is perceived. They are stuck in a classroom where they can’t get
out, or if they do try to leave, it is suddenly going to be very public.”
The most vociferous criticism
has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on
syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would
benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”
(contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses
suicide).
“Frankly it seems this is
sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly expecting physical
comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg Lukianoff,
president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit
group that advocates free speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach
people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part
of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”
The term “trigger warning”
has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term
for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual
abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.
An excerpt from a draft guide on
"trigger warnings" from Oberlin
College in Ohio.
On college campuses,
proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before
lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley
College this year after
the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds
of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called
it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns
that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”
Here at the University of California,
Santa Barbara,
in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters
held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of
feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of
fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery
charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her,
saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially
trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address
the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made
any policy changes.)
At Oberlin
College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that
would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The
guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning”
and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of
anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who
uses a wheelchair (or ableism).
“Be aware of racism,
classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of
privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence
are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your
classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said,
while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era
Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,”
it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious
persecution, violence, suicide and more.”
After several professors complained, the draft was
removed from a campus website, pending a more thorough review by a
faculty-and-student task force. Professors and campus administrators are
expected to meet with students next fall to come up with a more comprehensive
guide.
Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin’s
associate dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences,
said the guide was meant to
provide suggestions, not to dictate to professors. An associate professor of
comparative American studies and a co-chairwoman of the task force, Ms.
Raimondo said providing students with warnings would simply be “responsible
pedagogical practice.”
“I quite object to the
argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up,’ ” she said. “That absolutely
misses the reality that we’re dealing with. We have students coming to us with
serious issues, and we need to deal with that respectfully and seriously.”
But Marc Blecher, a professor
of politics and East Asian studies at Oberlin and a major critic of trigger
warnings at Oberlin, said such a policy would have a chilling effect on faculty
members, particularly those without the job security of tenure.
“If I were a junior faculty
member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified,”
Mr. Blecher said. “Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in
class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards,
and create a very tortuous process for anyone.”
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