@TomSrOfBoston My D. told me that while she really loved her first year at college, she was shocked by how intolerant many students were. Some found everything “offensive”. One even requested that she include a trigger warning when she posted a joke about eating beans. She was told this could be offensive to individuals with Crohn’s and other digestive disorders! I’m not joking.
Who they heck raised this generation of oversensitive little creampuffs.
@QuantMech Where do you draw the line? Should we include Trigger Warnings on “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “For Whom the Bell Tolls” because Vets might fight it disturbing? And what about Nabokov? Moreover, if people are so traumatised by literature, how do they watch the news? I lost a brother to cancer. Reading “Death Be Not Proud” made me cry because it cut so close to home. But I never dreamt of asking the teacher to warn us should any books be about children dying of cancer.
@sax It starts at a young age. I see children riding scooters in the park who are dressed like they are going out to play ice hockey. Somebody scrapes their knee on the school playground, and a formal “incident” report must be prepared. Fear is infectious. I have a sister-in-law who seems convinced that her home is about to be invaded by terrorists/illegal aliens/federal agents/Communists/Martians.
Yeah I know. Somehow my peer group raised this generation. Wonder what THEIR kids will be like?
Even the most absentminded professor has the common sense to understand that depictions of war, genocide, rape, and other violent/emotionally traumatic experiences could trigger some students. I’m fortunate enough that I’ve never experienced any of the above, and I’ve watched movies with such elements that make me cringe at their very memory. A general warning (“The clip/passage we’re about to see/read is not for the faint of heart. It includes (violent/traumatic event)”) can’t hurt. However, trying to list every possible trigger is a task that could keep a professor busy for 25 hours a day.
I think Potter Stewart’s criterion for obscenity works quite well for potentially triggering material: “I know it when I see it.” Since students are adults, I’d advocate warning them mostly in cases where you’d warn any adult audience. A movie on the Soviet Union’s planned famines of 1932-1933 or the Holocaust, featuring images of victims’ emaciated corpses piled upon each other, is something I wouldn’t want to surprise viewers with. The same is true of “Seven,” for similar reasons. The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, includes many “classist” elements, but the only element of that work that gave me pause was the graphic description of a dead body near the novel’s conclusion (a passage that Fitzgerald’s editor tried to cut, feeling that even an adult audience would recoil). Even that section was relatively mild. Until reading about the trigger-warning debate, I had no idea anyone found the novel’s “classism” offensive (would they consider Jonathan Swift’s “support” of cannibalism triggering?).
We have enough trust in professors’ common sense and their sense of perspective to trust them with students’ education; surely they can perform the same duty parents across the country do in deciding what movies might disturb an audience.
Life is not for the faint of heart.
The nightly news is one big, continuous, horrifying trigger.
As some of you may know already, from my previous posts, my daughter, still a HS senior, has been undergoing treatment - behavioral and medication - for severe anxiety.
One of the things they talk about in therapy is “triggering” and what is a trigger for their anxiety.
But here’s the thing - while a few triggers may be easily avoided, and maybe wisely so - many triggers cannot be, and are what others consider the normal everyday pace of life, or normal everyday banter…
The goal in treatment is to have my D and the other kids in her group, learn to cope with the everyday, ongoing triggers that are NEVER GOING TO GO AWAY. My D, and those like her, with clinical anxiety, can’t just drop out of life, nor should they.
But one thing they’re told in group is that they, themselves, need to learn to cope with the things that trigger their anxiety. It’s not up to others to go out of their way to avoid triggering them.
Life is stressful, and sometimes it’s just normal and appropriate (for lack of abetter word) that it’s stressful at a given moment. We all have our crosses and ghosts to bear, and we need to learn to exorcise them while still living among others.
I think it’s really good advice, and my daughter, honestly, seems to be handling things better because of it.
I’m not saying we should be insensitive to those who’ve suffered traumatic events, or excuse racism or sexism in the name of humor, or anything like that… Of course not.
But it really does seem that by completely avoiding the things that make us uncomfortable, we also avoid discussing them and thereby deconstructing them, and making them less scary and formidable, less powerful over us.
I sat in on my friend’s Psychology 100 class. The lesson happened to be on the nervous system and the physiological effects of stress. Toward the end of the hour, he mentioned that scientists insert rods into different parts of a cat’s spine to see how blocking the signal effects the nervous system.
No one groaned or did anything over the top, but 3/4 of the class visibly cringed.
The prof was rather unhappy. “What’s wrong with you guys? Would you rather they did it to little kids?!”
Perspective, I guess.
What if someone is triggered by the term “trigger warning”?
The scooter analogy above doesn’t fit this discussion. Helmets help avoid head injuries. It has nothing to do with triggers.
sorry post later…
@intparent Disagree 100%. According to Columbia University, “trigger warnings are designed to prevent students from experiencing preventable emotional injury or anxiety”. They are expressly intended to prevent psychological injury. Just like helmets are overkill for scooters, trigger warnings are overkill for those confronted by Lolita.
@NotVerySmart I utterly disagree. It is absolutely inappropriate for UNIVERSITY level faculty to preface certain topics or discussions with the warning, “The clip/passage we’re about to see/read is not for the faint of heart. It includes violent/traumatic events”. Not for the faint of heart? We are talking about universities, not kindergartens. How are these students going to function in society? Serve on a jury? Watch the news? Universities are precisely the place students should be compelled to confront such issues.
@sax Agree. I want to know what steps our universities are taking to ensure students are not accidentally exposed to the news. We wouldn’t want unpleasant everyday events to intrude on their “safe space”.
A classroom is a very public place, compared with the situations in which many people read or watch the news (at least, in our region). If a flashback is triggered by a news report, often the person is with family or close friends. The person may be alone. This is different from the classroom setting, in a relevant way.
A person who has been raped is very unlikely to be seated on a jury in a rape case.
I teach in a university. While I have been told by a number of women students that they have been raped, and I have discussed this with the appropriate campus administrators and the legal office, I have only once in close to 40 years had a discussion with a colleague that touched on the topic of rape on campus.
I would not know how to handle a situation where a student had a flashback that was triggered in my class. I avoid scientific demonstrations that involve explosions (small scale) or unexpected loud noises. Literary types of triggers are unlikely to arise in a STEM course.
The course of therapy for PTSD is a lengthy one, and a student cannot be expected to put his/her life on hold while the treatment is ongoing. If a faculty member could take a simple action that would avoid the risk of harm to a student, and that does not actually impinge on anyone else’s learning, why wouldn’t he/she?
This is different in my view from students who want to be shielded from opinions that they might find upsetting. Free speech is important. The candid exchange of views is important. Upset is different from trauma.
I’m okay with some limited trigger warnings - but perhaps students should do their homework to. It’s pretty easy to find out that Lolita is narrated by a child molester, or that All Quiet on the Western Front is a pretty realistic depiction of war.
Almost all great literature and art deals with the big two - sex and death.
In the best works, the two subjects overlap and the mix is often not just provocative, but disturbing. It’s supposed to be, actually. The best paintings, sculpture, plays, songs, and novels are supposed to shake us a little.
Professors surely must warn students that some will earn a B (or worse) in his/her class. Talk about trauma.