The Associated Student Senate last month passed a resolution demanding professors warn students about things in their classes that, in the words of one student newspaper report, "could potentially trigger symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
Not to be too dismissive, but, wow, that could be a pretty broad requirement. It could cover everything from German verbs (which traumatize many) to photos from the Battle of the Somme.
Look, it's hard to understand how you could teach about the Trail of Tears without making people uncomfortable. That horrid moment in American history should be disquieting.
UCSB students want their professors to flag in their syllabuses any content, according to the news story, "considered to trigger" trauma. "Considered to trigger?" What's that even mean?
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| What a class where all students are comfortable looks like. |
If that sounds a bit like the warning accompanying an R-rated movie that's because it's close. And perhaps carried to its illogical conclusion, college classes should come with a similar rating system. But can anyone really imagine an advanced physics class needing a warning that "we're going to get into the gory details of high-energy physics?" And Hamlet? Be warned: "Murder most foul ..." abounds.
If you've been raped, you've been traumatized. There's no doubt. Listening to a lecture about the subject likely wouldn't be pleasant for you. But it wouldn't -- or certainly shouldn't -- be pleasant for anybody. That doesn't alter the fact that discussing rape is a legitimate educational topic, especially at the college level. Likewise, so is slavery. And the death penalty. And white-collar crime. And poverty. Homelessness. Racism. Abortion. Death. The list of topic with the potential to make someone uncomfortable is endless.
And it's not just at UCSB. College students apparently face possible discomfort at Oberlin College where the Office of Equity Concerns has issued a 2,558-word trigger-warning guideline (http://new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot). For example, it says "Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more."
When the students, arguably some of the brightest around, demand content warnings what we begin is the slide toward content control, another phrase for censorship. So much for colleges being intellectual free-fire zones ... or even free-speech zones.
Rather than asking a professor to put little red flags on the course syllabus, how about the students carefully reading it when it's handed to them at the first class meeting? How about the students making some assumptions, not only about the work that's expected but also the content that's coming?
That doesn't seem too much to ask in a setting where ideas are meant to collide and academic freedom is alleged to be sacred.
Here, here. The "creep" you describe is a legitimate concern, and you've given an excellent defense of what the college classroom should be. Discomfiting knowledge, respectfully conveyed and openly discussed, is far preferable to circumscribed debate or outright ignorance.
ReplyDeleteIn any good class, the "flag" system wouldn't work because students continuously draw connections between the day's material and material that the class has covered in previous sessions. In other words, even if professors gave content warnings on a given day's topic to students, their insightful classmates would present "trigger" risks relating to that topic every other day.
College-level courses, especially in the humanities and social sciences, should aspire to challenge students by providing them with information that can provide a basis for drawing new conclusions,either reevaluating or affirming what they think they know or value in light of expanded knowledge or deeper reflection.