Imagine curling open the first pages of The Great Gatsby to find a warning label akin to those giant stickers on packs of cigarettes outside the United States. WARNING: This novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald contains violence against women. Read at your own risk. Imagine you are fourteen. Imagine that this is all you know of books — bound packets paper containing potentially offensive materials.
They’re called “trigger warnings” and they’re part of movement to ensure that everyone, everywhere is safe from offense and trauma. At Oberlin college, a guide circulated by the administration encourages professors to include such warnings in syllabi:
“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.”
So, yeah, this book is a classic, but it might make you have feelings.
The edges of the world are sharp. Bad things happen. In some countries, you can’t grow up 100% certain that you will, actually, grow up, that a bullet won’t errantly pierce your wall in the night, that you won’t be abducted from you school, that you’ll have enough food to make it to eighteen. And in America, in the heart of the country, at one of our finest liberal institutions, there’s a concern that an 18 year old might be uncomfortable in class and have to deal with the experience of getting out of their seat and leaving the room.
Said Bailey Loverin, a sophomore at Santa Barbara and a supporter of campus wide trigger warnings there, “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.”
(Where they can’t get out? Have we started chaining students to their desks? My god we are sensitive. It’s called running to the bathroom).
Fortunately, professors have spoken out:
“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.”
But we all know what happens when professors speak out…
