The College Fix

The American Association of University Professors came out swinging against trigger warnings in a report by a subcommittee on academic freedom and tenure, which has now been approved by the full committee.

The report calls trigger warnings “a threat to academic freedom,” pointing to a since-tabled proposal at Oberlin College that would have required warnings for topics involving “issues of privilege and oppression” (!) and a student petition at Wellesley College to remove a statue of a sleepwalking man in his underwear because it could cause “triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault”:

The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual. It makes comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement and—as the Oberlin list demonstrates—it singles out politically controversial topics like sex, race, class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention. Indeed, if such topics are associated with triggers, correctly or not, they are likely to be marginalized if not avoided altogether by faculty who fear complaints for offending or discomforting some of their students. Although all faculty are affected by potential charges of this kind, non-tenured and contingent faculty are particularly at risk. In this way the demand for trigger warnings creates a repressive, “chilly climate” for critical thinking in the classroom. [emphasis added]

The group puts trigger warnings in the same league as “labeling and rating systems” strongly opposed by the American Library Association as “an attempt to prejudice attitudes” and “a censor’s tool.”

While “institutional requirements” to use trigger warnings “interfere” with academic freedom, there are reasons

for concern that even voluntary use of trigger warnings included on syllabi may be counterproductive to the educational experience. Such trigger warnings conflate exceptional individual experience of trauma with the anticipation of trauma for an entire group, and assume that individuals will respond negatively to certain content.  A trigger warning might lead a student to simply not read an assignment or it might elicit a response from students they otherwise would not have had, focusing them on one aspect of a text and thus precluding other reactions. … Trigger warnings thus run the risk of reducing complex literary, historical, sociological and political insights to a few negative characterizations. [emphasis added]

In an argument reminiscent of civil-liberties groups who advocate that sexual assault on campus should be primarily investigated in the criminal justice system, not amateur campus tribunals, the professors say:

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. … 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.

Instead of putting the onus for avoiding such responses on the teacher, cases of serious trauma should be referred to student health services. Faculty should, of course, be sensitive that such reactions may occur in their classrooms, but they should not be held responsible for them. [emphasis added]

Indeed, the group says it’s “probably not coincidental that the call for trigger warnings comes at a time of increased attention to campus violence, especially to sexual assault that is often associated with the widespread abuse of alcohol.”

Like this guy said, and got raked over the coals for saying it.

Read the full report here.

h/t Reason

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter