This spring, students and professors across the country are demanding trigger warnings on class content that could trigger symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Oberlin College has recently published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional.
A student at Rutgers has requested a trigger warning for “The Great Gatsby” because, he worries, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless classic contains “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence.” This student also believes a trigger warning is necessary for Virginia Woolf’s, “Mrs. Dalloway” because it references suicide. He explains himself by stating, “reaching a compromise between protecting students and defending their civil liberties is imperative to fulfilling the educational potential of our university’s undergraduates.” It appears college students have become so used to being coddled that they no longer know the difference between solipsism and civil liberties. So why are more and more professors obliging to these juvenile requests and including trigger warnings in their syllabus?
The only logical explanation is that professors feel threatened. Those in favor of trigger warnings claim that the refusal of professors to include them is subjecting traumatized students to “revictimization in the classroom.” This is basically implying that if a student is triggered by mandatory class material, the professor is the equivalent to a perpetrator which is a pretty extreme argument. Who can blame teachers for not wanting to take that risk? Defenders of trigger warnings may honestly believe they’re helping trauma victims but the reality is they’re harming them by encouraging one of the most hindering symptoms shown by PTSD sufferers: Avoidance.
Sarah Roff, a psychologist and former professor of literature at Princeton University, wrote in a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “One of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD is avoidance, which can become the most impairing symptom of all. If someone has been so affected by an event in her life that reading a description of a rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses can trigger nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks, she is likely to be functionally impaired in areas of her life well beyond the classroom. The solution is not to help these students dig themselves further into a life of fear and avoidance by allowing them to keep away from upsetting material.”
The National Association of Scholars also protested trigger warnings and took to The Washington Post to announce their #triggerwarningfail contest last week. The NAS president, Peter Wood, personally selected the top three submissions. Here are the winners:
- Lolita: Disturbing novel. Narrator DOES NOT RECYCLE.
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Warning: May Contain Nuts
- Green Eggs and Ham: Glorifies GMOs.
Life doesn’t come with trigger warnings so why should literature? And is it trigger warnings or censorship these activists are actually fighting for? Jim Norton made his opinion clear on this topic and scolded the progressive left for becoming “exactly what you hated.”
“You have become exactly [like] the conservative, religious book burners of the 40s and the 50s and the 60s. You are it!” he said. “You are the speech repressors, you are the hypersensitive ones, you are the ones who want people fired immediately, you are the ones calling for people’s jobs. You have become what you hated.”
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