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By now, most people have heard about trigger warnings, a phenomenon causing much consternation and anguish on college campuses across the nation. Simply put, a trigger warning is a statement that an instructor places on his or her syllabus alerting students to the presence of one or more potential anxiety-inducing issues in an assigned reading (or viewing). Some institutions mandate the appearance of trigger warnings, which has led instructors to bitterly complain about infringements of academic freedom, not to mention evisceration of a college's time-honored duty to provoke, challenge, and discomfort students. Trigger warnings, these instructors maintain, assume the existence of fragile minds that must be perpetually coddled-a state of affairs to be deplored, not enabled.
The debate about trigger warnings has been most intense at Oberlin College, Wellesley College, and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).1 At Oberlin, a task force recommended that professors affix trigger warnings to any material on their syllabuses that might "disrupt" student learning by inadvertently causing trauma. As an example, it is suggested that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart should come with a warning that its contents may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more." Other specific triggers that professors needed to be aware of included classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and ableism. Indeed, the task force suggested that any items touching on "privilege and oppression" should be clearly identified and designated as such because doing so was an important part of "responsible pedagogical practice." As the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin stated, "I quite object to the argument that 'kids of today need to toughen up.' 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."
At Wellesley, protests greeted the installation of a sculpture of an underwear-clad man. Calling for the sculpture's removal, petitioners claimed that it "triggered memories of sexual assault among some students." At UCSB, a professor who showed a graphic film that included rape scenes was vilified for not issuing a trigger warning, and a pregnant professor of feminist students, after destroying pictures of aborted fetuses because she said they triggered fear in her,...