“Trigger warnings” create so many conflicting reactions in me that I can’t count them.
Trigger warnings, of course, are those advisements now issued on some college campuses to warn students of class content, speakers’ views, or whole events they might find traumatizing or just offensive.
My gut reaction is against these warnings. I agree with many conservative (and some liberal) commentators that college is not kindergarten; it is a place where students should be educated by, not sheltered from, ideas that are unsettling and sometimes downright painful.
As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt admonish us in their September 2015 Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” whereas “in the 1980s and ’90s … the student movement challenged the literary, philosophical and historical cannon seeking to widen it by including more diverse perspectives, the current movement is largely about emotional well-being … to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.”
I would, however, give free reign to professors who warn in their syllabi that some material might be threatening to particular students, such as those who have been traumatized by child abuse, sexual assault, or who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
University of Colorado Denver English professor Gillian Silverman says that “trigger warnings, when used correctly, can open up a space in which both professors and students can acknowledge difficult issues and address them head on.”
Similarly, Cornell University philosophy professor Kate Manne wrote in a Sept. 20 New York Times piece, “The point (of trigger warnings) is not to allow — let alone encourage — students to skip those readings or class discussions. Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves … and better manage their reactions.”
When Elizabeth Isemann, professor of political science at Southeast Community College in Nebraska, was asked by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to “be sensitive to images of war and violence in her lecture content,” she obliged. She told the students they could leave her World War II History class when she showed videos that depicted violent battle scenes. But they had to prove they had learned the content in other ways.
More problematic was the decision of Neil Gilbert, a University of California Berkeley professor of Social Welfare, to not even deal with the issue of trigger warnings and to simply cut the lecture on abortion policy from his class.
“Sensitivity has become a more important criterion than intellectual challenge,” said Gilbert. What irony that such a criterion could become the standard at Berkeley, the cradle of the free speech movement.
Perhaps most egregious in this whole “protection from free speech” ethic is when guest speakers are “trigger warned,” and then cancel their scheduled events. This happened at Rutgers in 2014 when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled her commencement speech because students protested her presence because of her involvement in the Iraq war.
And again, the same year, at Smith College, when Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, backed out of a presentation because 500 students charged that “the policies of the IMF fueled the oppression of women and girls worldwide.”
Just last year, Oberlin College students protested the appearance of conservative and “anti-feminist” speaker Christina Hoff Sommers because she didn’t believe that the “culture of rape” on U.S. campuses was real. Sommers, to her credit, did not back out.
I try to put myself in the place of a young college student today. As an avowed liberal/feminist, I hold the same positions as those who protested the above mentioned speakers.
But would I have spurned my peers and attended these presentations, if for nothing else but to test my own convictions? I hope so.
Dottie Lamm (dolamm59@gmail.com) is a social worker, former first lady of Colorado, and a retired adjunct professor at the University of Denver.
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