The posters on this thread actually working and/or studying at contemporary enlightened colleges seem to be saying the trigger warning bruhaha is overblown media hype. (Posters please correct me if I misinterpret you)
I would be interested in the first hand experiences of posters who object to trigger warnings.
Controversy sells articles and books. And supports organizations. Who is enriched by this bruhaha?
Of course, I acknowledge there are some extreme examples probably none of us would condone. However, they aren’t a campus norm. imho.
Yes, unlike many in this debate (both on and off CC), I’ve never been anonymous about my identity. I’m more than happy to reveal to people who I am and where I study (Univ of Michigan).
I am actually on campus. I am actually in classes. I am actually interacting with students all over the country (conferences, listservs, etc) in my liberal fields (American Studies, Women/Gender studies, History- my subfields are very liberal, Public Health, etc).
But sure, let’s take the word of anonymous people and parents and people who haven’t set foot on a college campus in 30 years (if ever) over those of us in the trenches. Just makes sense, amiright?
It’s finally starting to make sense to me why a certain candidate has achieved as much as s/he has.
QM, you seem to assume that the only purpose to reading Lolita would be to educate people about abuse. That isn’tt, however, why literature classes teach it; if it were, you’d be better off reading an article about child sexual abuse. I’m also not sure why alh believes (hopes?) that it will become “more and more irrelevant” as time passes – as the canon expands, it may get less attention simply because there are more books out there to chose from, but I don’t think any social change would make it irrelevant.
I taught Lolita (and Beloved) as part of a class on representing trauma. It dealt with both ethical and literary questions: are there traumas that shouldn’t be represented? How does an author represent would seem to be unspeakable? One of the fascinating – and profoundly ethical, I think – elements of Lolita is Nabokov’s obvious awareness of the danger that language can be used to romanticize or trivialize horrific experience. Humbert is a brilliant, compelling narrator, but that is part of what makes him so awful; to in any way mitigate his crimes because of his (often deliberately distancing) stylistic flourishes is to miss the point.
I’m not going to recommend that people on this thread read Lolita. But I will suggest reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which provides a powerful model for what a sensitive reading of Nabokov’s work looks like – and what such a reading can accomplish.
@romanigypsyeyes I won’t hide under anonymity either. The references I made took place this past year at Barnard, Columbia and Amherst. I have children at the first two, and have been advising a student at Amherst. So they weren’t based on conjecture or third hand sources. The truth is that I was very impressed that Barnard made reading Lolita compulsory because they felt the entire issue of Nabokov’s treatment of pedophilia and child sexual abuse was worthy of study, especially at a woman’s college.
Well, because it’s a topic that certain people use to bash academia, and as an academic, I feel obligated to point out truth from, you know, first-hand experience (and to point out the lack of actual, you know, data on the subject).
So Tipper Gore was right and we should have warning labels on books and recordsthat contain ‘bad stuff’?
Are those who might be offended excused from reading the assigned books, watching the movies, discussing the material? Do they still get credit for the class?
My daughter had to read a book or two from a list the summer before 7th (8th?) grade. I read a few of them to see if I could find one she might like. Honestly, they were all a little ‘triggering’ and not appropriate for that age group IMO. D is adopted, and from China, and one was about a Chinese woman who had been mistreated by a stepmother and her father, sent to boarding schools and orphages, beaten, starved. Lovely. And no, not a good choice. Another was about a catholic in Poland in the war who was raped and a ‘war mistress’ at a prison camp, almost froze to death. Another about a girl who had to go live with an ‘uncle’. I think the books were more traumatic for me thinking about the triggers my daughter might have. She just thought they were all boring and long.
Yep, Tipper was right, just label everything as inappropriate.
If I understand correctly, it isn’t being labeled as inappropriate. It is being labeled as potentially upsetting. This gives the reader a chance to prepare. I have seen it compared to labeling a tv show or movie as “contains mature subject matter: nudity, language, violence, etc” which we pretty much accept as an everyday given.
There are professors on this thread. Have students in your classes chosen not to read a book because it was too potentially upsetting?
Sometimes we do hear media accounts of such things. A first year student at Duke recently wrote an essay explaining his refusal to read the summer reading: Fun Home.
I can’t think of any other examples off the top of my head. Anyone else have another?
I’m on the thread for Warbrain.
ETA: and sort of hoping we will all decide to stop and reread Lolita and Beloved and apprenticeprof will lead a discussion. fingers crossed!
@dfbdfb Nobody is bashing academia. Barnard’s President Debora Spar has spoken eloquently on the danger of avoiding offense, so has Drew Faust at Harvard and the new Vice Chancellor at the University of Oxford (who happens to be a woman). Much of the opposition to trigger warnings is coming from within academia.
To quote Louise Richardson of Oxford University:
“We need to expose our students to ideas that make them uncomfortable so that they can think about why it is that they feel uncomfortable and what it is about those ideas that they object to”.
@alh I have had one student ask not to read a chapter from a book. It was a collection of essays rather than a lit-type book. It was an explicit account about the author losing her mom to breast cancer. My student’s mom was in the late stages of breast cancer and she just didn’t think she could handle it. So, I assigned her a different chapter and all was fine. No one else in the class knew and she came to me privately to talk about it.
Professors and TAs/GSIs are reasonable people (for the most part).
And yes, @exlibris97, there are plenty of people on here bashing academia. I just responded to one such post on the last page.
I don’t think this illustrates your point at all. The student, who is Jewish, gave a Catholic school a look and found that–quite legitimately–the atmosphere was just too Catholic for him. He didn’t say that he was traumatized or that they didn’t have a right to display crucifixes. It didn’t come as news that they were Catholic. He just didn’t know how it would feel to him until he went there. No harm, no foul.
I think this is perfectly reasonable. Especially since whenever “will a non-Catholic be comfortable at X Catholic school” comes up, the overwhelming response is that of course they will be.
apprenticeprof, the class that you describe sounds very interesting to me, and it touches on several topics of major significance: To paraphrase you, How should trauma be represented (if at all) if it is unspeakable? And how can one guard against the mitigation of horrible actions, by a representation that distances, romanticizes, or trivializes them?
I see this as totally appropriate for a university class. (To be honest, I probably still would not have signed up for it.) But would you object to giving students a “heads up” about the content of the books (aka trigger warning)? As a separate question, would you object to providing an alternative assignment for students who could not handle the central works of the class? I acknowledge that this might be difficult or impossible, since class discussion is presumably an important part of the class.
If you were teaching about the Holocaust, and you had students whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and who had very strong emotional reactions to it, would you accommodate them in any way?
I have found that my students are remarkably open to my introducing a potentially controversial topic, such as diversity in the workplace, when I make it a point to use as many of the au courant terms as possible (think LGBTQQIP2SAA) by saying something like “look, that’s just too awkward to use as many times as I need to - I’m going to use [this term] and please understand that it comes with an asterisk that indicates that it’s shorthand for your preferred term.”
AM (re: post 114): To my mind, a “warning” is appropriate only when disturbing content is unexpected given the novel’s subject matter, and couldn’t easily have been discovered in under a minute of research. A one-line summary of In Cold Blood, or Lolita, or Night tells you that these books concern horrific situations, so as long as the novel has been listed on the syllabus, I think the onus is on the student to do his or her homework. As I said above, I did warn for Beloved because while a brief summary would let a student know to expect a tough read, it wouldn’t necessarily lead them to expect certain scenes of sexual violence. I also think that if you are teaching a class on literature of trauma, or Holocaust fiction, anyone taking it should be prepared for some disturbing content.
If a student were asking for a modification, it would depend, for me, on the level of accommodation being requested. If we are talking about excusing the student from a single class discussion, I’d be inclined to grant that – and, in fact, in most cases a student could quietly absent themselves from a single discussion without incurring any penalty even without having checked with the teacher. If a student is claiming to be unable to attend any class discussions, or wants to be exempted from significant portions of the syllabus, I would ask them to go through proper channels to secure accommodations – and I suspect “I can’t read half of the books in this course” would not be considered a reasonable accommodation even if they went through those channels, and even if the student had a psychological diagnosis.
Yup- a suggestion suddenly becomes “the students are freaking out!”
From the dailymail report (which, you know, is the Daily Mail but it seems to be the basis of all the stories):
“An Oxford spokesman said: ‘The university aims to encourage independent and critical thinking and does not, as a rule, seek to protect students from ideas or material they may find uncomfortable. However, there may be occasions when a lecturer feels it is appropriate to advise students of potentially distressing subject matter.’”
Translation for some: “You cannot under any circumstances hurt the poor delicate students by using offensive words or else you will be fired and an appropriate person will be put in your place- like Mr. Rogers.”
But to the rest of us, it means “Hey, you may want to consider whether or not this might be traumatic. We’re not going to tell you that you must warn students, only that you should keep it in mind.”
Why don’t we just assume that nearly everyone has some sort of hidden trauma? However, as adult students in the academic world they seek, they need an adult level of resiliency and not “trigger warnings.” Perhaps issue a general trigger warning: “college will challenge you an be upsetting at times. If you are not up to the task, please request your refund from the registrar.”
Of course, this would be coupled with a multi-page informed consent form and a new college administrative office for it management, Office of Hypersensitivity. They could have a bin of free gender neutral teddy (can I say teddy without offense?) bears for those who need them.
If a professor wants to use class time opining on potential trigger warnings, have at it. For my money, I would rather he/she focus on the content of the course. But students demanding warnings and administrations requiring warnings and supporting the whiners is unacceptable. If you think that hypersensitivity on campus is overblown or even imaginary, just ask the college administrators who have lost their jobs over it.
