I teach literature classes at a community college. My school does not require trigger warnings, and I don’t recall the topic ever coming up. I’ve read discussions about them in The Chronicle of Higher Education but mostly let the issue pass me by.
That said, for years I’ve considered it common courtesy to let my students know what they’re getting into on opening day. In January, I will say something like this: “I won’t tell you which book is which, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we will encounter some topics that might concern some of you. The most significant is sexual assault, but you won’t have to read anything very graphic for more than a few sentences. There will be some very brief scenes of domestic violence, but not many of them. One novel will be filled with a lot of swearing, but mostly words you can hear on network television. There will be two or three F-bombs.”
(So far as I know) I almost never have a kid drop my class because of the content warning. More frequently, it’s because they dislike something about ME, or we’re reading more books than they think they can handle, or a space opened up in a class they would rather take.
I have occasionally had a student tell me privately that she was a survivor of sexual assault and felt uneasy about a certain book. So we talk about ways of dealing with that that do not include giving up on the book. Generally, when we’ve finished with the book, they tell me the experience was a lot less horrifying than they’d feared and they were glad they’d stuck it out.
So that’s my reality.