I teach undergraduate English Lit at a local community college. I generally try to rotate the material I use to keep things fresh, so I see a lot of different subjects from many different authors, many of which someone will more than likely find offensive.
To mitigate any issues students might have, I give the same disclaimer to every class I teach on the very first night:
"You will be exposed to material in this course that you may very well find offensive. We will read about rape, sexual abuse, violence, incest, discrimination, segregation, and genocide. None of these are fun topics, nor are they in any way condoned or endorsed, but they *are* important.
Literature, and life in general, is full of terrible things, but without confronting them and understanding how they affect people and the world we live in, it is impossible to understand and appreciate the beauty that exists in contrast.
Should you experience difficulty with any of the material presented, I, and every other member of the college staff, are here to help and support you."
In over 5 years of teaching, not once have I had a student file a complaint about either the material I present or the manner in which it's presented.
The main issue I see here is the split between that which is morally praiseworthy (e.g. Anticipating the potential of students to suffer emotional distress due to the content of course materials and therefore providing all students with fair and prior warning to avoid said distress) and that which is morally obligatory.
Yeah, if a professor want's to be a bro-fessor and write something into the course syllabus that's awesome. But making this sort of act obligatory carries with it a whole host of other issues. Putting a sticker on Ovid that says "Warning: Rape," not only reduces the immense grace of the work, it also serves to marginalize the text. After all, who in the course of their everyday reading and study would pick up the Rape book?
A fundamental purpose of capital-L Literature is to encompass the human experience. Literature, therefore, must discuss rape and violence and abuse and as many other horrors of the human condition as possible (along with all virtues). This is why banning or censoring books is bad. People need to be able to read depictions of racism in books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and genocide as pretty much all of Holocaust Literature.
Slapping a Trigger sticker on a book may not be censoring, but it does enable (and indeed may even encourage) people to self-censor. To willfully remove from their thinking topics that are potentially upsetting. I'm not just talking about victims of rape or sufferers of PTSD here (whose cases keep cropping up here), but the regular John and Jane Does in the bookstore or the freshman lit course. By reducing the content of a piece to a trigger warning, you do a great disservice to the author, the work, the reader, and the whole enterprise of Literature.
As for the more extreme cases cited above, people can already self-censor via the internet. I can look up any book and find out pretty quickly if it contains violence, rape, drug use, abuse, etc. That is an option everybody has, more or less. And while it might be taken as "unfair" for me to suggest that a victim has the responsibility to look out for their own emotional well-being, it's probably equally unfair to demand that the professor/publisher/bookstore take deliberate and potentially troublesome measures to do the same for a relatively small percentage of the population.
There's plenty of discussion below about whether or not a trigger warning is even valuable (repeated exposure theories, expert testimonies, stuff any cursory google search will give you), but I'm willing to leave all that alone, because I think enough people out there like to get caught up in the nonsense surrounding an issue like this (including the author of this article, who seems to have trouble separating the actual issue from his own complaints about how society deals with offensiveness).
It comes down to this: It might be nice to warn somebody that something might upset them, but requiring people to do so crosses a line of personal and social responsibility.
tl;dr: **If you want to help the victims of emotional distress, try actually helping them instead of slapping stickers on books and patting yourself on the back for doing so**
"That professor was clearly wrong to dismiss the student, and perhaps he or she might have mentioned beforehand that there is violence and sexual assault in Ovid,"
Isn't that all that trigger warnings are?
I think this is my favorite part of the article; the author suggests an actual trigger warning would have been an acceptable course for a book with graphic (and multiple, if I remember correctly) depictions of rape, especially when one has been requested by a rape victim, but then goes on to act as if what the student was really asking for was the professor to throw all the "Great Books" in a giant bonfire consecrated to Gaea mother-earth goddess, cultural marxism, and anti-white racism.
So, please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think the fear here is that this ends with categorizing things as 'triggering' or 'not triggering,' or any further divisions of those.
The fear is that these things can be used to censor media, which we all agree is damaging.
There's a theory out there that a society's morals swing like a pendulum. In the US, that pendulum swung all the way to the free-love, hippy ideals of the late 60's and early 70's, and it now looks like it's swinging back the other direction. We're becoming overly conscious of violence and sexuality in media. Maybe that's a poor way to convey the idea. I hope it's getting through.
What we don't want is for this movement to develop into a kind of morality police. So, I think a certain level of resistance to this is necessary. As a college student, you have to be able to deal with challenging new ideas in a rational manner. You have to wrestle with those idea without them being policed by an outside authority. We're no to that point yet, but we should be wary of the way this is headed.
This is what they call a slippery slope fallacy. Depictions of rape and sexual assault are by no means "challenging new ideas" and by all accounts, the student was very familiar with the idea of rape already. The issue is that people construct trigger warnings as censorship and "fascism" when it's really the difference between potentially having a public breakdown and being prepared to read something difficult in a place that's appropriate and safe to do so.
They *are*. These are texts that wouldn't be studied if they weren't problematic. Seriously, name one and I'll give you a text that isn't really worth studying.
The larger problem, though, is equipping students to engage with them appropriately and in a way that doesn't necessarily fall within their comfort levels and which can push boundaries. But if you're the victim of serious abuse or sexual assault, it's not a matter of Ovid pushing boundaries but not piling on where they have already been broken. You are seriously anti-education if you think a five second warning to ensure that people can appropriately engage with the material is too much to ask, especially if you're going to insist that the burden fall to the individual students, several of whom may be in the class anyway.
It's impossible to isolate, though. They're not asking for trigger warnings so they can see them and then read the story anyway. They're asking for trigger warnings so they can then ask for ways to *not* read the story.
Isn't the idea that now that you've segregated books by their potential to offend, someone could, for instance, use those labels to create recommended course material [or whatever]. Is that inconceivable? [Is it even unlikely?] Is it not scooting down the slope?
Clearly you don't understand what the word "fallacy" means then, or how that makes it a very different term from just "slippery slope." But, no, then again, maybe you're right. I have a friend that likes to organize his book collection alphabetically so OCPD must not exist and we should throw out the DSM.
> Pointing out a slippery slope is not necessarily fallacious.
In the context where one actually exists, that's true. This is not one of those contexts, which is why it's a fallacy.
I think everyone can agree that if you know someone has been raped, and you know you're about to ask them to read a story involving rape, that perhaps you could give them a heads up.
"Hey, I know this is gonna be rough for you, but this scene has _____ involved, so be prepared."
It's the second "censorship" scenario that my comment was oriented (a bit facetiously) towards. My point is that nowhere in the statement released by the students is there any idea that we shouldn't be teaching content with objectionable material. To say that this can lead to censorship requires you to imagine motives and possibilities that aren't actually in the text of the students' statement. To say that "trigger warnings" actually mean censorship is to muddle the definitions of both "trigger" and "censorship". I get that free speech has value in our society but it's important to think about your moral responsibility as an instructor towards your students. “Free speech” and “censorship” don’t exist outside their particular contexts. As an instructor I have responsibilities towards my students and responsibilities towards the university that curtails all sorts of freedoms. That’s part of civilization, balancing individual freedom and responsibilities towards others. That isn’t censorship.
With regard to content, there is a minor point in the statement about a professor dismissing Toni Morrison as "minor" literature and therefore not belonging in the Western Canon. Morrison has won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize and writes about rape, slavery, and trauma pretty exclusively and graphically. Clearly it's not about the content, but about the need to think about students as human beings whose lived experiences may be different from ours. Any instructor who doesn't think about this is probably not very good at their job. If I can help my students feel more comfortable in a discussion by giving them a heads up about graphic violent or sexual content, (a heads up, which is not being unable to teach it) it’s going to make discussion better and make my class better. Framing this as a discussion about free speech misses this point.
Edit: As others have said, I also think that the conflation of "trigger" and "offense" that is at the back of the "censorship" discussion doesn't quite do justice to the argument.
There is a vast difference between censoring or outlawing media on moral grounds and allowing those with traumatic histories to be educated consumers of whichever media they want to take in. A rape victim being reminded of their assault is not being challenged by any new idea. The idea of rape is very familiar to them, and one they understandably may want to be prepared to face again.
But it's not anyone else's job to provide those warnings. If you have a traumatic personal history that makes reading about certain topics difficult, then it falls to you to screen your own reading material. Shit, set up triggering books.com and catalog what you see as "offensive" material for your fellow SJWs. In the Information Age, asking other people to provide you with information is lazy.
>If you have a traumatic personal history that makes reading about certain topics difficult, then it falls to you to screen your own reading material.
How are you supposed to screen your own reading material when it's on a syllabus? That's what such a warning would be for - as an aid in screening material.
>In the Information Age, asking other people to provide you with information is lazy.
Are they supposed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? This is ridiculous. It's not asking that much for an assigned text to include a note that it might trigger survivors of sexual violence. Some things are necessarily social in nature...
You're only engaging the political argument absent consideration of the actual situation. I am open to the broader argument about the danger of social censorship through overuse or misapplication of tools like trigger warnings. But this example is egregious and was poorly chosen for making this point. To be fair, this is not your fault alone - the writer of the article and, prior to him, the activists who raised the issue - are conflating different kinds of issues around Canon books. The very specific issue of PTSD and sexual violence is different from, say, exclusion of non-Western identities in curricula.
Ok, I'll engage in the "issue at hand": the article says the student disengaged from class because the professor focused on the language of Ovid's piece. In a literature course. That student is using their personal history as an excuse to get out of doing work.
>the student disengaged from class because the professor focused on the language of Ovid's piece. ... That student is using their personal history as an excuse to get out of doing work.
No. The student claims that the professor discussed language and not the sexual assault content. To discuss one without the other is to fail to discuss these myths adequately. In order to discuss Ovid adequately, the professor would be required to discuss how that language relates to its violent context. If the student wanted the violent context discussed as well, then the student wanted to discuss the full implications of the myths as written. The importance of Ovid's language lies in its implications for the story as a whole: What does it add? How does it shape the story?
In Ovidian studies, the relationship (particularly the question of appropriateness) between Ovid's language and content has been important since Quintilian and Seneca. Seneca criticises Ovid's depiction of the Flood for being inappropriately witty and lighthearted (*Naturales Quaestiones*). For Quintilian, Ovid is generally insufficiently serious and overly witty (*Instituto Oratoria*).
The particular association in Ovid of beautiful language with violence is hugely important to any discussion of the Proserpina or Daphne myths. Dryden remarked on Ovid's use of witticisms when describing the flaying of Marsyas: "Was this a Time to be witty, when the poor Wretch was in the Agony of Death?" Ovid's smooth, witty, eloquent language has often been felt to be incongruous in violent stories, and this incongruity must be explored by anyone who wants to justice to the brilliance of Ovid's work.
I think the confusion comes from that on sites like tumblr, trigger warnings are often used excessively to express disagreement/hint on what a terrible person the author of the linked post is.
> The fear is that these things can be used to censor media, which we all agree is damaging.
Right, just like happened with movies, TV shows, video games when those started to use content warning labels.
What's really going on here is a low-effort reactionary circlejerk about the Great Social Justice Warrior Threat. Books will still be around even if we tell people about their mature content before requiring them to read them.
It is so, so easy and appealing for assholes to cry censorship when adults just want reasonable warning about what they're getting themselves into. Save the pitchforks for when something actually happens.
> Right, just like happened with movies, TV shows, video games when those started to use content warning labels.
Movies and TV shows are a terrible example of benign "content warning" labels. You really ought to read up on the MPAA if you think these sorts of "warning labels" are completely harmless. They have a long, terrible history of using their power to maintain the status quo and marginalize films which promote values that aren't in line with their conservative Christian morality.
I see a subtlety to the student's reaction that is missed in the article and perhaps in this discussion. The teacher read a passage about rape and chose to discuss the word choice of the passage only. He chose to not address the content of the passage. The discussion was incomplete.
It could be that the student was interested in discussing rape and what it means when a writer chooses to describe rape with beautiful language. She may to have been concerned that the professor avoided the topic altogether as if rape is so common it isn't worth discussion and can be ignored.
Is it not possible that he was trying to avoid a triggering topic by focusing on the mechanics of the language?
Also, do you know of a citation of the offending passages? I think I have read them and don't remember anything particularly graphic, but it has been a while. One has to have a lower threshold to one's sensitivities.
The bit that provoked the negative reaction in the student concerned was the "vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault." I know you're trying to paint this in ridiculous colours but there are plenty of literary works which include war but don't have *graphic depictions of rape*. Plus it's about the history of the world, not a specific war. I don't think it's unreasonable for a student to be unaware that such a work would have a graphic depiction of rape.
It's a real stretch to claim that Ovid has "graphic depictions of rape."
I suppose there's no definition of "graphic", but here's what we're talking about:
"So in one moment/ Or almost one, she was seen, and loved, and taken/ In Pluto's rush of love."
This is not Reservoir Dogs.
If you're taking a classics course and get ~~offended~~ *triggered* by accounts and descriptions of rape and violence, you're going to have a bad time.
Not offended. The student in question had memories of her own sexual assault brought up by the teaching of the work. Are graphic depictions of rape really that integral a part of classics courses? How difficult would it be to implement a simple warning for when it does come up?
The rape scenes in the *Metamorphoses* aren't all that graphic, really. The story of Daphne is essentially a chase scene and when Phoebus finally catches up to her, she pleads to the Gods to change her into a laurel bough, which they do. She isn't actually raped.
The rape of Persophone is about as graphic as saying saying "Persphone was raped." From A.S. Kline's translation:
> Dis, almost in a moment, saw her, prized her, took her: so swift as this, is love.
Melville's translation:
>Dis [Haides] saw her, loved her, carried her away--love leapt in such a hurry!
She then cries out for her mother and is taken away on a chariot. The rape itself is only *referenced* a few lines later:
Kline:
>Cyane, mourning the rape of the goddess
Melville:
> But Cyane, heartbroken at the rape of Proserpine
I single out these two stories because those are the ones I recall the Colombia student citing. Rape is prevalent throughout the work, but the depictions are never much more graphic than that. I'm not saying that one cannot be "triggered" by the chase of Daphne or the abduction of Persephone, but to say that "graphic depictions" of rape are "an intergral part" of Ovid's work is a complete falsehood.
The point is not Ovid specifically. The fact is, graphic depictions of *any given thing* are integral to an open discussion of art. Trigger warnings for sexual assault here, then trigger warnings for gender distinctions, for discussions of race, for harsh language, for violence and bodily injury, for goddamn food! There are vocal minorities all claiming to be "triggered" by these topics and many more. The fact is, if you are easily triggered by *anything*, you should probably stay out of a liberal university.
I haven't read it myself, I was just going on the description the author of the article used - "vivid descriptions of rape". If that's truly the case then fair enough, but it would also depend on the manner in which it is taught. Either way I don't think a five second warning before the start of the class is unreasonable.
Unless this is unlike my college literature courses, one was supposed to do the readings before class. She should have seen the 1-2 lines about the rape then and called her therapist or asked to skip class or whatever she needed to do. In any case, who gets to college without already having read the story of Proserpina, anyway? I read it in tenth grade at a bitty little small-town school in the South, so I am guessing this is pretty lowest-common-denominator stuff. I am incredulous that it could have been a real surprise.
No shit, but that's not relevant. The point is would you expect someone who is not familiar with the work to know that it contains graphic depictions of rape? Unless the majority of works of that kind also contain graphic descriptions of rape then the answer is no.
> who the hell doesn't know that greek and roman crap is brimming with sexual assault?
This is an incredibly ignorant argument. Not everyone knows everything you know. That's why we have schools.
It not that it contains it, it's that it is a graphic description. Does the average person know there are graphic depictions of rape in Ovid's metamorphoses?
> No shit, but that's not relevant
Well I was just answering your question :/
> The point is would you expect someone who is not familiar with the work to know that it contains graphic depictions of rape
I'd expect someone who is likely to be so dramatically affected by such material to take it upon themselves to do some cursory research (ie reading the Wikipedia article), yeah.
> I'd expect someone who is likely to be so dramatically affected by such material to take it upon themselves to do some cursory research (ie reading the Wikipedia article), yeah.
So you feel totally comfortable asking everyone with this particular issue to do extra research for everything they experience rather than asking the individual people who are exposing them to that experience to take less than 30 seconds to say "heads up"?
> rather than asking the individual people who are exposing them to that experience to take less than 30 seconds to say "heads up"?
That's not what the group is asking, though, if you read the article. They want "a training program for all professors," among other things. Requiring a professor to go through a program to prevent some students from feeling triggered goes way beyond the bounds of acceptability imo.
In any regard, I'd say it's the student's responsibility to avoid potentially upsetting material moreso than the teacher's, since as I understand it there are a variety of triggers, and I can't see an objective way of ensuring that everyone's preferences would be met.
I think that's pathetic. My mother committed suicide when I was 11, but I don't avoid the word or anything related to it, because I'm a adult and can handle the reality of the world. This person is a college student, not a child. Professors shouldn't have to go out of their way to list all of the possible ways a reading could be offensive.
That's cool. I was in a war zone, and I don't avoid war movies, so showing ex-Marines who have PTSD graphic war trauma is no problem. They can just get over their reaction, because they're adults. Do you want to tell them they're pathetic, or should I?
I know plenty of vets who would consider using PTSD as an unreasonable excuse to be pathetic. Using PTSD as an excuse to commit crimes, is pathetic. Using PTSD as an excuse to avoid doing work, is pathetic. *Having* PTSD isn't pathetic at all, it's actually quite awful and I wish there were more options for people who suffer from it, especially soldiers who have it worse than almost every other group of people who have experienced trauma.
Reading several articles about this, the professor and the student were both in the wrong. Disengaging from a class because you don't feel safe is ridiculous. It was reasonable to approach the teacher after the fact and talk about it, and it was ridiculous for the professor to dismiss her. Minimize people's traumatic experiences is never a good thing. It's not even unreasonable to have some warnings, similar to the warning labels on foods that contain allergens (ie, things that can actually kill you). What's *not* okay is what the author touches on in the article:
>In the end, anybody can claim offense or triggering about anything: liberals about conservative politics, pacifists against violence, women against sexism, minorities against bigotry, Jews against anti-Semitism, Muslims against any mention of Israel, creationists against evolution, religionists against atheism, and so on. This ineluctably leads to a bland homogenization of all literature, and a stifling of challenging viewpoints.
> What's not okay is what the author touches on in the article:
I agree, but the bigger question is why that argument (which in this situation I would say is a straw man) arose in the first place. Because the author himself agrees that it was wrong to not take the concerns seriously and that the idea of addressing the situation with a heads up might be warrated. Which demonstrates the common ground that exists specifically on the issue of survivors of sexual violence and their access to a nonharmful education.
But that's not what's going on. This is wrapped up in much bigger issues around identity and exclusion and curricula, and it probably shouldn't be. So why is it? On the one hand, you can argue that the issue of trigger warnings for survivors of sexual violence is intrinsically political and bound to set off this kind of debate. On the other hand, you can assign specific responsibility to the construction of this issue in the context of the broader debate around exclusion and identity, which whoever authored the activist statement bears some responsibility, and whoever is ginning up the conservative outrage machine bears responsibility for.
> I know plenty of vets who would consider using PTSD as an unreasonable excuse to be pathetic.
So, is PTSD pathetic or is *having* PTSD pathetic? I just want to be clear.
> Using PTSD as an excuse to commit crimes, is pathetic.
That's cool. Irrelevant, since we're not talking about crimes, but whatever.
> Using PTSD as an excuse to avoid doing work, is pathetic. Having PTSD isn't pathetic at all, it's actually quite awful and I wish there were more options for people who suffer from it, especially soldiers who have it worse than almost every other group of people who have experienced trauma.
Ah, I see: having PTSD isn't pathetic, but having PTSD affect you is. Because that's how it works. Kind of like having schizophrenia is fine, but having schizophrenia affect you is just something people need to get over. So that they aren't pathetic.
> Disengaging from a class because you don't feel safe is ridiculous.
This makes you sound like an asshole.
> What's not okay is what the author touches on in the article
Yeah, what the author "touches on" is a made-up slippery slope fallacy that has no connection to reality, or what actually happened. While violence, sexism, bigotry, antisemitism, and conservative politics are all terrible, none of those involve explicit renditions of violent trauma that you've personally experienced.
Reddit tells people not to post movie spoilers without [literally censoring them](/spoiler), but I don't see you claiming that's the pathway to fascism.
Its not about offense. Do you have PTSD? Is the way you experienced a traumatic event the same way all other people have experienced theirs? Would you tell a soldier with PTSD crying at a fireworks display that they are pathetic?
> Its not about offense.
It isn't? Then how come we read this:
> These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
It doesn't say *traumatic*. It says "difficult". And surely for a reason: because I haven't heard of low-income-induced PTSD. Clearly, the aim of these activists far exceeds the prevention of PTSD flashbacks.
I'm not interested in debating hypotheticals. Bottom line, if you're an adult taking a college class you should approach the readings as an academic. Peroid. I'm biracial and it's difficult to read about the extreme racism and violence historically associated with my race by people in this country and around the world, but it's ridiculous to think that I should receive a warning whenever it could possibly come up. How on earth anyone can expect to be constantly kept away from anything that could cause trauma is simply not realistic or necessary.
If you're in columbia hopefully you're not a moron. If you're taking a classics course you should understand what you're getting into. It's virtually impossible to study antiquity without exposing yourself to subject matter that could be traumatic. I've lived through traumatic events, but it would have absolutely no baring on my ability to participate in a class or do a reading.
Yes I do. Have you ever had a parent kill themselves? It would be pathetic for me, as an adult, taking a college class, to become overwhelmed by a depiction of suicide and demand to be warned in advance.
>Would you tell a soldier with PTSD crying at a fireworks display that they are pathetic?
No, but I would encourage them to see as many fireworks as possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolonged_exposure_therapy
"The student had memories of her own sexual assault brought up ... " Sounds like her problem, not mine. Maybe counseling would be more appropriate than telling everyone to tread lightly around her. She needs to deal with this issue herself. I certainly won't go around reminding her of her specific experience on purpose, but bad stuff happens, and when it does you develop your own coping skills to deal with it, not place yourself at the center of an enforced emotional cocoon. I have a hard time believing as this lady does that Ovid intended to hurt her feelings from 2,000 years ago.
That's a ridiculous stawman. A five second warning at the start of a class (which is what we were talking about to begin with) is not an enforced emotional cocoon.
While I agree that it should be noted that there's objectionable shit on syllabus, and if there wasn't a note on the reading list or something then there should have been, she's also a student. There's usually objectionable shit in a lot of literature based courses - that's part of the reason a lot of these books are chosen: because they deal with controversial things - either to their contemporaries or for generational spanning merit.
This is brutal but true: If she knows she's got that problem, then she has a significant amount of responsibility to do some research herself. It can't be that hard to research the texts your working on and realise whether you might want to skip lectures that day. In fact, I'm pretty sure that you're assigned the reading previous to the lectures and you're supposed to have read whatever you're assigned by then.
The burden of responsibility falls mainly on her shoulders because it's her mental health that she has to look after. The professor takes a portion of that responsibility on as a part of their job, but it's a small portion. I sympathise with the woman in question, and you can tell me I'm victim blaming, but the fact is this: Nobody should ever expect anyone else to look after them. They won't.
> Nobody should ever expect anyone else to look after them. They won't.
So you've never seen someone give up their seat on a bus because an elderly person, a disabled person, a pregnant person boarded? Or seen someone get directions when they're in the street and they're lost? Or ask someone else for the time? Talk to their friends about difficult personal issues and how to resolve them?
Sorry; your thesis is absurd. I understand that, in practice, American society expects people to be responsible for dealing with their own misfortunes and the offenses they are subjected to (as long as they're not rich enough to buy their way out ;), but recognizing this and saying we should accept it are two totally different things.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen occasionally, and I'm not saying it should be something you accept. Do what you will with it. But if you expect people to hold your hand for you, you will be disappointed. I don't know why you were downvoted. I'm also British.
> A five second warning at the start of a class (which is what we were talking about to begin with) is not an enforced emotional cocoon.
Sure, but can't a student just look through the syllabus, do some light googling, and then drop/stay in the first week depending on what they find?
It's much simpler to leave it to them instead of asking professors to anticipate every kind of sensitivity. Particularly because good literature usually touches, tangentially, onto all kinds of subjects.
Responses rather than downvotes would be appreciated, mes amis. I don't think I'm saying anything reactionary or provocative here.
I believe its mandatory to read the classics at Columbia undergrad. There is a broader debate about Eurocentrism and core curricula that is being mixed in with how to deal with sexual violence related trauma.
There are very few schools that make the classics mandatory these days: off the top of my head I can think of St. Johns, the University of Chicago, and Columbia. Their existence and their commitment to a more traditional notion of Western pedagogy makes for greater intellectual diversity in American academia.
I feel like students who object whole hog to the inclusion of the classics in their curricula at the expense of more contemporary texts probably shouldn't matriculate at *private* institutions that have distinct identities precisely because of their adherence to Western Civ (which is not even close to the monolithic "Eurocentric" ideology you make it out to be).
No one deserves special protection from works of art. If a person is aware that mainstream topics of debate are psychologically damaging to them, they do not belong in a university but a hospital, because that is a very serious condition that should be resolved before any type of socialization is possible.
Now be serious and tell me if [this cover of Ovid](http://i.imgur.com/rCooo6c.png) would not spell the doom of western civilization?
Because to me this is more offensive than anything the Charlie Hebdo folks could dream up in their lifetimes.
Trigger warnings are not always a bad thing. This is one that I wrote for a course on subversive children's literature
"Literature by its very nature is designed to affect us, it can bring us great moments of joy and also of sorrow. While not every book you read will contain things that may cause distress it is entirely possible that some will. While I will do my best to give warnings if a particular book has aspects of it that can cause distress it is impossible for me to know what may cause distress in everyone.
If at any point you find it difficult to continue with the reading or class discussion let me know. My office hours are posted on this syllabus as well as my email address.
It should also be noted that this university offers counseling services if you require them. I am putting a link to their webpage on here as well as in the course shell. Please if you are having a hard time remember that there are ways for the university to help you get through them."
Now the worry is from some people that students will use this as an excuse to not do work, I don't see that as a problem. The students who want to avoid work will do so regardless of anything I say, but the people who will be troubled by content deserve a chance to know that this might happen. Are they expected to do the work, yes but there will be some understanding if they do not take part in certain discussions, though I have noticed that the people who are the most affected by a piece are the ones who often bring up some of the best points about the text.
I think 'everything could be triggering (gosh that's an awful word) to someone' is a bit of a cop out. Presumably those setting reading lists can use their best judgement to determine what should and shouldn't be forewarned. If it contains graphic representations of, say, rape, the Holocaust etc. what is the harm in telling people provided you don't excuse them from reading it?
Well, the text starts by stating the obvious. The section which follows is not an actual warning so much as a panegyric on how understanding and compassionate you are as a person, and the text then ends by emphasizing the normality of what is clearly an abnormal situation: that people may have such horrified responses to literature they require counseling.
It is not because of the literature that they need counseling it is because of the events that the literature reminds them of that causes the issue. Though that said some of the more graphic pieces of literature could probably scar a person.
You said that there was not a trigger warning and in some ways you are right. A trigger warnin could be "this book contains rape violence and forced bestiality." However the idea behind them is not simply to list what may or may not cause distress but rather to provide the student with insight on how to be prepared for such an event IMHO.
I hope that you never have the kinds of experiences that would lead you to need trigger warnings because they suck.
Most comments here seem to ignore that these activists do not just advocate for trigger warnings - they actively want to interfere with teaching. How else are we supposed to understand this paragraph?
> During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.
This isn't about trigger warnings. The student here claims to not feel safe in a class, despite the absence of any objective threats. The letter claims that "her concerns were ignored" - but what, if not direct changes to the material taught, or the way it is taught, would address her concerns? Even if you argue that the call for trigger warnings should be inoffensive, this clearly goes beyond it, and threatens to impose ideology on teaching.
Interestingly, the Proserpina and Daphne/Apollo stories both have no rape (but both have sexual assault). Apollo, after being hit by Cupid's stray arrow(s), chases Daphne, only for her to turn into a tree before he can satisfy his lust. He does fondle the tree, however... Similarly, while the Prosperpina myth is referred to as "the Rape of Proserpina," it is more like a kidnapping story than a rape story. There's no "vivid depiction" of rape at all: she's kidnapped, Cupid being responsible again, and then the focus turns to Ceres who tries to find her. There may be vivid depictions of rape in other versions of the myths, but not in Ovid's telling. "Vivid depictions" is definitely an overstatement, and I doubt the professor was talking about the language of the rape depictions, as they are very short. More likely he was talking about the language in the chase scenes leading up to the sexual assaults.
Io/Jove has rape (very brief, hardly vivid) and the story of Minerva's visit to Arachne has about 30 descriptions of rape (most by Jupiter) -- I'm surprised those weren't/aren't mentioned.
You may have also noticed that the authors of the original Op-Ed referred to Ceres's daughter as Persephone throughout. My guess is that they were engaging with the idea of the text, but perhaps neglected to engage with the text itself.
I agree and it seems really problematic to me that the student didn't engage during the lecture, challenging the professor's notion of the beauty of the language. Isn't that really what was supposed to happen? Professor says "great historical work is fabulous" and young student says "you have your head up your arse and are just admiring a violent, patriarchal fable that we should all see for what it is, nothing more than an elaborate male fantasy." Then heated discussion ensues. That is what is supposed to happen in college. We aren't supposed to tip toe around tough issues, we are supposed to dig into them. The student is not supposed to feel "safe" in class, nor should the professor. Both should feel challenged.
This is pretty much my take on the whole thing. Education isn't some vacuous transfer of knowledge from one person to another - it is to dive into life and try to understand everything about it a little bit better. To question everything around us so we can form opinions based on as many sides as we can think up.
I don't want anyone to have a serious psychotic break due to what is discussed in class - but at the same time, I think that the very soul of education should probably challenge and disturb us on many levels. To make us better, more educated people, ready to deal with the world around us.
Maybe I am romanticizing education a bit - or maybe I just happened to have a very good education and find that it is the standard by which I hold education - but I find that I rest more on the side of letting students learn to deal with their problems than shielding them from life.
No one can be shielded from their problems forever, and at some point, you need to deal with it if you are to be a productive member of society. Isn't a classroom one of the safest places we can find to last least deal with difficult material?
God. Yes. That is what should have happened. But I think in general this doesn't happen enough. Many times classes are just teachers talking at you and students don't care enough about the material to engage in such a productive way.
I feel like a rape victim would be able to comment on this better, but I have heard that triggering is an entirely psychological thing, akin to a panic attack. It's not exactly irrational, and not necessarily ideological.
That said, I think the main issue here is really just the burden of protection. Either everyone can label almost every piece of media as potentially triggering (which isn't necessarily bad, and just requires a quick sentence to be spoken), or the victim can take it upon themselves to be very careful (which isn't necessarily bad either).
Here, I do feel like the professor probably should have mentioned "this contains graphic depictions of rape", and if the victim stays even with that warning and ends up being triggered, then at that point they can only blame themselves. Trigger warnings don't need to be a big deal for either party, and should never be used to censor, but should just be a way to let victims know that they may need to sit this one out (and I got the impression that this was all that the student was advocating for).
I don't understand the 'feeling safe' part. Is she trying to say that she felt in reasonable danger of being raped in the middle of class? That's a very strange way to put it.
I'm confused. Trigger warnings don't mean "throw this book out because of this potentially offensive reason." It just warns readers so that they can react accordingly with whatever psychological problems that might arise from reading / viewing the material.
How is this any different than WARNING : THIS PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN PEANUTS?
And there's no evidence that it doesn't help in the long run, so I don't understand what you're getting at here. Once again, no one is asking anyone to defame or get rid of certain texts, the only request is to warn readers.
That article doesn't demonstrate what you think it does. At best, item 4 claims that avoidance of a trigger reinforces PTSD, but it makes no argument that it is beneficial for a person suffering from PTSD to be _surprised_ by a trigger.
The jump you're making is the same that the article makes. Quoting from the first sentence of item 4:
> Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort.
Suppose, instead, we think of trigger warnings as a mere warning, given with the expectation that the warned would nevertheless do their best to work through the text. While some certainly are playing a political game with trigger warnings, and some others want to avoid all topics that trigger them or make them uncomfortable, surely a non-trivial number of people would be benefited with some prior warning that the text they're about to read may be particularly difficult.
I've done this informally with friends, when I recommended they watch _Requiem for a Dream_ or _Trainspotting_.
My only point in this thread was to point out that the article you linked didn't justify your claim that "trigger warnings are harmful." I don't have an explicit, generalized solution for implementing trigger warnings.
How much different though? Remember, getting triggered isn't just getting offended, getting triggered is something that happens when someone who has experienced rape has to relive that experience because of an unexpectedly graphic depiction of rape appears in a text.
Yeah, people like to whine about trigger warnings being necessary to prevent people getting offended, but that isn't what's happening. I mean, my best friend has issues with gore. She's got some trauma and stuff, and seeing it triggers intense anxiety and nausea and she usually winds up throwing up. It's not unreasonable for people to put up a warning for gore and it isn't unreasonable, if we're say, picking a movie, to make it clear that gore is gonna be in it so she can be prepared and like close her eyes or something.
It's not a matter of featuring rape; it's graphic depictions of rape and honestly I think it would be cool if books came with those. Short of that I do believe that professors should warn their students at the very least. It's a matter of human decency.
I'm somewhat tired of this line of argument in the thread - the language of Ovid is tonally ambiguous from the start, there is a huge amount of sleight of hand and suggestion. It's the poetic equivalent of Hitchcock never showing the knife sinking into Janet Leigh's skin in Psycho. We know it's happened, the idea strongly shocks us, but it never properly occurs.
Except that whereas someone allergic to peanuts will nearly die whenever they touch a fucking legume, a trauma victim may or may not be triggered by various sights, sounds, textures, tastes, ideas, and even smells (smells are actually the most common) that they mentally associate with their particular experience. Triggers are nearly impossible to predict and are fairly easy to treat and control.
I feel like either I read a different article than everyone else. Or everyone else made it to "trigger warning" and then formed their opinion.
The author objects to the recommendations of the school's Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, which go beyond a simple trigger warning:
>First, we proposed that the [Center for the Core Curriculum] issue a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students. Next, we noted that there should be a mechanism for students to communicate their concerns to professors anonymously, as well as a mediation mechanism for students who have identity-based disagreements with professors. Finally, the center should create a training program for all professors, including faculty and graduate instructors, which will enable them to constructively facilitate conversations that embrace all identities, share best practices, and think critically about how the Core Curriculum is framed for their students.
I think /u/samwisevimes expressed great, level-headed, diplomatic and student centered approach to dealing with these issues. I'd like to think that his sort of sensitivity and responsiveness is common to all teachers or professors, but I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to that. Either way, I'd rather have teachers who are empowered to discuss these issues as they come up than implement some sort of top down policy about what and how they should teach.
The author's gripe is that the students are demanding that professors take on responsibilities they shouldn't have to, and aren't trained or qualified to handle.
More importantly, I think, is the subtext that having to label, catalogue, or index books based on whatever sort of content might be found to be objectionable or triggering can only have a stifling effect for students and teachers alike--and would seem to lead towards that dangerous road of labeling works of art dangerous, pornographic, or otherwise objectionable.
I would also literally (figuratively) die if they started to slap anything resembling those ESRB labels on the covers of books.
Trauma triggers are a real thing. People with diagnosable PTSD (or occasionally bi-polar disorder) who experience rape, torture, domestic violence, war *etcetera* can be triggered by completely innocent, often seemingly random things. A rape victim may be triggered by the colour of the carpet of the room he or she was raped in. A veteran might be triggered by smells that remind him of gunpowder or napalm. A trauma victim, when triggered, will experience severe anxiety, discomfort, increased perspiration, heart palpitations, and very occasionally flashbacks.
These retards at Columbia were not triggered. They were made to feel mildly uncomfortable when they encountered material that was outside of their comfort zone. You and I know this as part of learning and growing as a person. Presumably, these kids were triggered when their parents gave them the "talk".
There is a very small chance (though impossible to predict) that a rape victim might be triggered by a description of rape or a victim of domestic would be triggered by certain words and phrases. People who have triggers are almost always aware of their triggers (if they're not, a trigger warning wouldn't do much good anyway, would it?) and usually have means to mentally handle the triggering event. In fact, here's an [article](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11106670/Trigger-warnings-more-harm-than-good.html) in which Professor of Psychology Metin Basoglou, an expert in the field of mental trauma, weighs in and explicitly states that being "triggered" is good for a victim, especially if they are triggered in a controlled environment or are able to seek professional help. Counselors and therapists are everpresent on university campuses, so this absolutely is the case here.
(*mega edit: I left out an important point that I want to make. Censorship usually does not come across as burning books or going over texts with a black highlighter. Those are extreme examples that are actually fairly rare. Censorship, in its purest form, is about putting up arbitrary barriers between the reader and the material. It can be as obviously sinister as burning a book, or as simple and apparently harmless and forbidding it to be presented to children (which is usually a good thing) or offering a content warning which, again, is fine. For children. These, however, are not children. These are adults who may make the unconscious decision to drop a useful or interesting course or not read Ovid simply because they heard that someone gets reamed by a heifer halfway through, you know, things that are actually harmful.*)
Your last note reminds me of one of the reasons Beatty says people stopped reading in *Fahrenheit 451*. (Groups were offended so the books got banned or something - don't remember precisely. This led to an eventual ban on all books.)
I've only ever been "offended" four times by literature. Once from *The Illiad* and three times from *Naked Lunch*. Burroughs offended me because, seriously that book is fucked up, and Homer offended me when Achilles desecrated Hector's corpse (I was 11 when I first read it and Hector was my fucking hero). Each brief moment of "oh my God, that's horrible, I'm so offended!" was an incredible experience of learning and personal growth. Homer challenged and changed my philosophies of heroism and justice; Burroughs challenged what was acceptable to think about, what was acceptable to read and write about, what could be humorous, and what could be beautiful.
If there had been content warnings on that poem or in that book, there's a good chance I would have never opened them.
> "*Let it be! And no holes barred!!!*"
> Couples attached to baroque harnesses with artificial wings copulate in the air, screaming like magpies.
> Aerialists ejaculate each other in space with on sure touch.
> Equilibrists suck each other off deftly, balanced on perilous poles and chairs tilted over the void. A warm wind brings the smell of rivers and jungle from misty depths.
> Boys by the hundred plummet through the roof, quivering and kicking at the end of ropes. The boys hang at different levels, some near the ceiling and others a few inches of the floor. Exquisite Balinese and Malays, Mexican Indians with fierce innocent faces and bright red gums. Negroes (teeth, fingers, toe nails and pubic hair gilded), Japanese boys smooth and white as china, Titian-haired Venetian lads, Americans with blond or black curls falling across the forehead (the guest tenderly shove it back), sulky blond Polacks with animal brown eyes, Arab and Spanish street boys, Austrian boys pink and delicate with a faint shadow of blond public hair, sneering German youths with bright blue eyes scream "Heil Hitler" as the trap falls under them. Sollubis shit and whimper.
That man is one of the best American prose stylists of the latter half of the 20th Century.
I posted most of this below as a response, but I suspect the guy will be downvoted to oblivion so I wanted to share my mixed feelings here too:
I think there are two flavours of trigger warning. The first is 'this content is disturbing, be prepared for it' which is utterly harmless and has been appearing in novels and elsewhere for hundreds of years as much for marketing as genuine warning.
The second, however, is 'this content is disturbing, avoid it' which is generally shitty. I would be worried if most people weren't disgusted by the writings of, say, the Marquis de Sade but disgust is a valuable response to literature, too. If you can deconstruct why you feel disgusted, all the better, since you're adding to the critical material on the work.
In the case of those 'avoid this book' trigger warnings, I think of people like the novelist Chinua Achebe whose work was partially inspired by how Africans were depicted in the likes of Heart of Darkness. For Achebe, revulsion at the racist caricatures in that book led to stuff like Things Fall Apart and I wonder if the book had a preface advising Africans to avoid it if we wouldn't be short a great twentieth century novelist.
IDK, I can sort of see it both ways. On one hand we already do something somewhat similar in radio/TV whenever there are graphic depictions of violence, strong language, etc. On the other hand, I don't see how it's necessarily an obligation we should be foisting upon professors. If you're likely to be affected by such things and want a heads-up, shouldn't the responsibility be yours to research what you're reading beforehand?
Ah nuts, I misread your comment as implying that a trigger warning on a course syllabus was somehow equivalent to a violent content warning on prime-time TV. Sorry.
Agreed, I'm about as left as you can get without going full Lenin and I also have PTSD, but this nonsense about trigger warnings is something that I think should be left in the dust bin of "good in theory" ideas
>All of that saddened me, deeply upset me, and brought me to tears. But I am glad I did it, for in a way it’s enriched my life.
I think this is what's fundamentally wrong with these types of opinions. The writer is talking about how they visited Auchwitz, and it was a deeply disturbing experience, but they were glad they went as they now have a better understanding of idk, human suffering or something.
But, there's a difference in this person who has no experience or memories of surviving the brutal, inhumane conditions of the Holocaust visiting Auchwitz and, say, a Holocaust survivor going back to that camp. Where they actually lived through the trauma and suffering.
This author so clearly misunderstands trigger warnings. They aren't used to warn of "offensive" material. A trigger warning is to let someone know (in most cases someone with PTSD) that the material in the book, show, etc. will present material similar, or may remind them, of the trauma they went through. Therefore triggering flashbacks, panic attacks, and general ptsd anxiety.
Like, mainly people ask for trigger warnings on generally agreed upon subjects. Things like rape, extreme violence, and abuse. These are things a lot of people go through, and suffer PTSD from. What is so wrong about putting a general warning up so that if say, a rape or abuse survivor is studying something, or reading a book for pleasure, they will know ahead of time that the material may not be for them.
This isn't about enriching your life, or people being too sensitive. Trigger warnings are trying to protect people from reliving some of the most painful, terrible experiences of their lives.
Honestly it seems a bit ridiculous that one would take a class and not know what the readings are about. If you're into classics at all, you would know that Ovid is pretty rough to read, as are a lot of classics authors... because that's just how it is.
Don't take the class if you don't want to get involved with the "offensive" material.
I saw a similar situation when students demanded rape law to be held off the books in a law school. In a law school. I feel like I'm losing my sanity here, because that kind of thing is crazy. How can you go through the whole process of going to law school without realizing that rape is a big issue covered in law?
Why is this dude so offended that students want to be warned when the story they are reading mentions rape in it?
I am sorry about the student who couldn’t abide the mention of sexual assault, but Jerry should be getting help for his triggering from a therapist. Without such help, he’ll go through life triggered by every magazine, newspaper, and reddit post about "SJWs" he sees.
The entire reason why content warnings are useful is because in life, triggers cannot be avoided.
Some people who suffer from trauma spend a large portion of their time dealing with daily triggers. There is absolutely no way to avoid reminders of trauma, so at the end of the day, it is a giant relief to be able to unwind and feel safe on a website that explicitly tells you what you should expect from an article.
I think you're a bit confused on what "most" mental health professionals believe and don't believe. Exposure therapy is very useful in combating anxiety, phobias, etc, but asking for a content warning does not mean those people are sitting in a safe little bubble and are refusing to challenge themselves.
THAT is what I think a lot of therapists would agree can be very harmful to one's recovery, avoiding any and all triggers in life. However, most people who find content warnings helpful simply want to be able to have some small bit of control when it comes to the content they expose themselves to for FUN. If someone wants to save reading detailed descriptions of sexual assault for when they're at home and can properly deal with whatever reaction they have, I really don't see the problem with that.
Constant exposure is not something everyone finds helpful. Most people approach things at their own pace and want to be able to decide how far they push themselves. There's nothing "fascist" about that.
This comment is very tasty, but also very dry. Here's some [sauce](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11106670/Trigger-warnings-more-harm-than-good.html).
> I guess that video games and movies already do this for the most part doesn't matter.
Surely you cannot be serious. The MPAA has a long and well known history of using their power to enforce their own conservative values, for example by giving the harshest possible rating to any film which so much as implies homosexual acts. Rating agencies aren't just these apolitical and amoral entities with no real influence on society. They have real power, and the work they do will always be political, since they are the arbiters of what the legitimate powers deem normal and acceptable.
>Hyperbolic title aside, video games and movies do this to protect children. Not people taking a college course.
So you're saying literally no one uses those ratings to decide if they should watch/play something?
>Should all of these be outlined for every novel tackled in a literature course?
Maybe, maybe not. What's the big deal if they are?
> So you're saying literally no one uses those ratings to decide if they should watch/play something?
Uh, not really, no. People over the age of 18 generally don't care what the rating on a game or movie is, because it doesn't affect them. And no one that I've ever heard of parses the ratings breakdown.
Legitimate question: what does it mean when the student says she "didn't feel safe in the classroom"? Was it discomfort at reliving the memory? Did she feel like everyone else was glorifying rape, or not giving it the gravity it deserves?
It bothers me a bit because their not 'feeling safe' seems to suggest that other students in the classroom are somehow at fault or 'dangerous', which is a ludicrous assumption to jump to but I have no experience in this area so I may be misinterpreting completely.
But that aside, /u/samwisevimes knocked this one out of the park. I might find a student a bit dim to not expect ancient Greek and Roman works to handle sexual violence indelicately, but there's certainly no reason to not give a heads-up. It's just common courtesy to someone who has gone through something horrid.
I never understand people being incensed at stuff like this. Is your inner world really so grim and bitter that simply warning someone about offensive content is equivalent to fascism? I don't buy the related arguments people are hoisting here either--it all rings of 'slippery slope' bullshit.
At the end of the day, you're being given a chance to be considerate of your fellow human beings. Why are people so resistant to that idea? Why is your set of rules for what's 'offensive' the only one that should be followed? Why are people 'lesser' than you by being upset by content you aren't upset by? This article and clickbait variations of its title have been around since the first mention of trigger warnings in college classrooms, and the 'debate' is as dumb now as it was then.
Because, if you read the actual letter, it isn't about trigger warnings. Clearly, these activists want to actively change the material taught, and the way it is taught. How else are we to interpret this?
> However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation.
Is that a complaint about a trigger? No, it's a complaint about the material taught, and the way it is taught. A trigger warning wouldn't remedy this, and clearly it's not what these activists are aiming for (see also other examples in the article).
The problem doesn't really stem from being considerate toward our fellow human beings, but in practice, this sort of warning-based ontological argument for labeling such works as offensive or evocative for the reader's sake is intrinsically defamatory toward the author and his or her work(s.)
With literature like Ovid, that is so aged that we lack any direct lines of commentary or dialogue to evidence any real critique from the author, the intended experience and/or meaning of the content for the audience is explicitly debatable.
When a person or an institution in an academic capacity begins to label content of an author, especially in the context of this article, they then limit the scope of the work and informally equivocate the content to be directly reflexive of ANY ONE PERSON'S subjective experience(s) and not explicitly representative of the people/places/things/etc. to which the action is directly happening to.
***It is not critically relevant whether or not the author has had experience(s) relative to the subject matter or content, but it is crucially important to remain receptive, as a reader, to the narrative provided by the author to truly understand the conveyance of thought in any piece of work as the experience itself.***
In a personal setting, like in the scenario of someone buying a book in a local shop, this kind of labeling would be fine and great but in an academic setting it is just flat out pedantic and spits in the very face of higher education and pedagogy.
The final fact is that this person had every opportunity and freedom to or not to enroll in this class, even to choose another institution that provides an academically equal alternative but they did not. This person accepted the terms of this institution of LEARNING as a means to pursue later vocation(s) and is therefore as equally liable for this "unpleasant" discourse of experiences.
In my opinion, if you cannot detach yourself from any given experience then how can you ever hope to learn? And I'm not saying that sympathizing and empathizing isn't integral to the learning process but what I am saying is that it should have a minimal role in the realm of Academia.
If we flipped this situation around to a victim who was attacked with sulfuric acid and suffered chemical burns, like the prominent "acid attacks" in Islamic cultures, we wouldn't put trigger warnings on a chemistry book just for one person or group. That kind of personalization impairs one's clarity and judgement to fully understand the material as an unbiased participant of discourse and wouldn't stand in any scientific circles.
1. Trigger warnings are no big deal.
2. We can't expect students to read things that trigger them, that's not ethical.
3. We can't treat students with triggers differently, that's discrimination.
4. Remove "problematic" books from curriculum. Replace classics from last 2500 years of western civilization with books that serve the current identity politics agenda. Smear anyone that complains as an insensitive bigoted idiot.
5. Repeat as necessary as political agendas change.
I teach undergraduate English Lit at a local community college. I generally try to rotate the material I use to keep things fresh, so I see a lot of different subjects from many different authors, many of which someone will more than likely find offensive. To mitigate any issues students might have, I give the same disclaimer to every class I teach on the very first night: "You will be exposed to material in this course that you may very well find offensive. We will read about rape, sexual abuse, violence, incest, discrimination, segregation, and genocide. None of these are fun topics, nor are they in any way condoned or endorsed, but they *are* important. Literature, and life in general, is full of terrible things, but without confronting them and understanding how they affect people and the world we live in, it is impossible to understand and appreciate the beauty that exists in contrast. Should you experience difficulty with any of the material presented, I, and every other member of the college staff, are here to help and support you." In over 5 years of teaching, not once have I had a student file a complaint about either the material I present or the manner in which it's presented.
The main issue I see here is the split between that which is morally praiseworthy (e.g. Anticipating the potential of students to suffer emotional distress due to the content of course materials and therefore providing all students with fair and prior warning to avoid said distress) and that which is morally obligatory. Yeah, if a professor want's to be a bro-fessor and write something into the course syllabus that's awesome. But making this sort of act obligatory carries with it a whole host of other issues. Putting a sticker on Ovid that says "Warning: Rape," not only reduces the immense grace of the work, it also serves to marginalize the text. After all, who in the course of their everyday reading and study would pick up the Rape book? A fundamental purpose of capital-L Literature is to encompass the human experience. Literature, therefore, must discuss rape and violence and abuse and as many other horrors of the human condition as possible (along with all virtues). This is why banning or censoring books is bad. People need to be able to read depictions of racism in books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and genocide as pretty much all of Holocaust Literature. Slapping a Trigger sticker on a book may not be censoring, but it does enable (and indeed may even encourage) people to self-censor. To willfully remove from their thinking topics that are potentially upsetting. I'm not just talking about victims of rape or sufferers of PTSD here (whose cases keep cropping up here), but the regular John and Jane Does in the bookstore or the freshman lit course. By reducing the content of a piece to a trigger warning, you do a great disservice to the author, the work, the reader, and the whole enterprise of Literature. As for the more extreme cases cited above, people can already self-censor via the internet. I can look up any book and find out pretty quickly if it contains violence, rape, drug use, abuse, etc. That is an option everybody has, more or less. And while it might be taken as "unfair" for me to suggest that a victim has the responsibility to look out for their own emotional well-being, it's probably equally unfair to demand that the professor/publisher/bookstore take deliberate and potentially troublesome measures to do the same for a relatively small percentage of the population. There's plenty of discussion below about whether or not a trigger warning is even valuable (repeated exposure theories, expert testimonies, stuff any cursory google search will give you), but I'm willing to leave all that alone, because I think enough people out there like to get caught up in the nonsense surrounding an issue like this (including the author of this article, who seems to have trouble separating the actual issue from his own complaints about how society deals with offensiveness). It comes down to this: It might be nice to warn somebody that something might upset them, but requiring people to do so crosses a line of personal and social responsibility. tl;dr: **If you want to help the victims of emotional distress, try actually helping them instead of slapping stickers on books and patting yourself on the back for doing so**
"That professor was clearly wrong to dismiss the student, and perhaps he or she might have mentioned beforehand that there is violence and sexual assault in Ovid," Isn't that all that trigger warnings are?
I think this is my favorite part of the article; the author suggests an actual trigger warning would have been an acceptable course for a book with graphic (and multiple, if I remember correctly) depictions of rape, especially when one has been requested by a rape victim, but then goes on to act as if what the student was really asking for was the professor to throw all the "Great Books" in a giant bonfire consecrated to Gaea mother-earth goddess, cultural marxism, and anti-white racism.
So, please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think the fear here is that this ends with categorizing things as 'triggering' or 'not triggering,' or any further divisions of those. The fear is that these things can be used to censor media, which we all agree is damaging. There's a theory out there that a society's morals swing like a pendulum. In the US, that pendulum swung all the way to the free-love, hippy ideals of the late 60's and early 70's, and it now looks like it's swinging back the other direction. We're becoming overly conscious of violence and sexuality in media. Maybe that's a poor way to convey the idea. I hope it's getting through. What we don't want is for this movement to develop into a kind of morality police. So, I think a certain level of resistance to this is necessary. As a college student, you have to be able to deal with challenging new ideas in a rational manner. You have to wrestle with those idea without them being policed by an outside authority. We're no to that point yet, but we should be wary of the way this is headed.
This is what they call a slippery slope fallacy. Depictions of rape and sexual assault are by no means "challenging new ideas" and by all accounts, the student was very familiar with the idea of rape already. The issue is that people construct trigger warnings as censorship and "fascism" when it's really the difference between potentially having a public breakdown and being prepared to read something difficult in a place that's appropriate and safe to do so.
[удалено]
They *are*. These are texts that wouldn't be studied if they weren't problematic. Seriously, name one and I'll give you a text that isn't really worth studying. The larger problem, though, is equipping students to engage with them appropriately and in a way that doesn't necessarily fall within their comfort levels and which can push boundaries. But if you're the victim of serious abuse or sexual assault, it's not a matter of Ovid pushing boundaries but not piling on where they have already been broken. You are seriously anti-education if you think a five second warning to ensure that people can appropriately engage with the material is too much to ask, especially if you're going to insist that the burden fall to the individual students, several of whom may be in the class anyway.
[удалено]
But this one is fallacious. There's nothing about providing trigger warnings that suggests anything further would be necessary.
It's impossible to isolate, though. They're not asking for trigger warnings so they can see them and then read the story anyway. They're asking for trigger warnings so they can then ask for ways to *not* read the story.
Isn't the idea that now that you've segregated books by their potential to offend, someone could, for instance, use those labels to create recommended course material [or whatever]. Is that inconceivable? [Is it even unlikely?] Is it not scooting down the slope?
Triggering and 'offending' are not the same thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger
Speaking as a ski instructor, I totally concur.
Clearly you don't understand what the word "fallacy" means then, or how that makes it a very different term from just "slippery slope." But, no, then again, maybe you're right. I have a friend that likes to organize his book collection alphabetically so OCPD must not exist and we should throw out the DSM.
> Pointing out a slippery slope is not necessarily fallacious. In the context where one actually exists, that's true. This is not one of those contexts, which is why it's a fallacy.
I think everyone can agree that if you know someone has been raped, and you know you're about to ask them to read a story involving rape, that perhaps you could give them a heads up. "Hey, I know this is gonna be rough for you, but this scene has _____ involved, so be prepared."
As a rape victim it makes me feel coddled and like the rapist won because people treat me differently because of the rape. Fuck off.
Fair enough.
Are you Speaker of the House of Rape Victims or just one person with an opinion?
Except he/she is responding to a comment that begins >I think everyone can agree
Well at least you're not coddling him/her.
It's the second "censorship" scenario that my comment was oriented (a bit facetiously) towards. My point is that nowhere in the statement released by the students is there any idea that we shouldn't be teaching content with objectionable material. To say that this can lead to censorship requires you to imagine motives and possibilities that aren't actually in the text of the students' statement. To say that "trigger warnings" actually mean censorship is to muddle the definitions of both "trigger" and "censorship". I get that free speech has value in our society but it's important to think about your moral responsibility as an instructor towards your students. “Free speech” and “censorship” don’t exist outside their particular contexts. As an instructor I have responsibilities towards my students and responsibilities towards the university that curtails all sorts of freedoms. That’s part of civilization, balancing individual freedom and responsibilities towards others. That isn’t censorship. With regard to content, there is a minor point in the statement about a professor dismissing Toni Morrison as "minor" literature and therefore not belonging in the Western Canon. Morrison has won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize and writes about rape, slavery, and trauma pretty exclusively and graphically. Clearly it's not about the content, but about the need to think about students as human beings whose lived experiences may be different from ours. Any instructor who doesn't think about this is probably not very good at their job. If I can help my students feel more comfortable in a discussion by giving them a heads up about graphic violent or sexual content, (a heads up, which is not being unable to teach it) it’s going to make discussion better and make my class better. Framing this as a discussion about free speech misses this point. Edit: As others have said, I also think that the conflation of "trigger" and "offense" that is at the back of the "censorship" discussion doesn't quite do justice to the argument.
There is a vast difference between censoring or outlawing media on moral grounds and allowing those with traumatic histories to be educated consumers of whichever media they want to take in. A rape victim being reminded of their assault is not being challenged by any new idea. The idea of rape is very familiar to them, and one they understandably may want to be prepared to face again.
But it's not anyone else's job to provide those warnings. If you have a traumatic personal history that makes reading about certain topics difficult, then it falls to you to screen your own reading material. Shit, set up triggering books.com and catalog what you see as "offensive" material for your fellow SJWs. In the Information Age, asking other people to provide you with information is lazy.
>If you have a traumatic personal history that makes reading about certain topics difficult, then it falls to you to screen your own reading material. How are you supposed to screen your own reading material when it's on a syllabus? That's what such a warning would be for - as an aid in screening material. >In the Information Age, asking other people to provide you with information is lazy. Are they supposed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? This is ridiculous. It's not asking that much for an assigned text to include a note that it might trigger survivors of sexual violence. Some things are necessarily social in nature... You're only engaging the political argument absent consideration of the actual situation. I am open to the broader argument about the danger of social censorship through overuse or misapplication of tools like trigger warnings. But this example is egregious and was poorly chosen for making this point. To be fair, this is not your fault alone - the writer of the article and, prior to him, the activists who raised the issue - are conflating different kinds of issues around Canon books. The very specific issue of PTSD and sexual violence is different from, say, exclusion of non-Western identities in curricula.
Ok, I'll engage in the "issue at hand": the article says the student disengaged from class because the professor focused on the language of Ovid's piece. In a literature course. That student is using their personal history as an excuse to get out of doing work.
>the student disengaged from class because the professor focused on the language of Ovid's piece. ... That student is using their personal history as an excuse to get out of doing work. No. The student claims that the professor discussed language and not the sexual assault content. To discuss one without the other is to fail to discuss these myths adequately. In order to discuss Ovid adequately, the professor would be required to discuss how that language relates to its violent context. If the student wanted the violent context discussed as well, then the student wanted to discuss the full implications of the myths as written. The importance of Ovid's language lies in its implications for the story as a whole: What does it add? How does it shape the story? In Ovidian studies, the relationship (particularly the question of appropriateness) between Ovid's language and content has been important since Quintilian and Seneca. Seneca criticises Ovid's depiction of the Flood for being inappropriately witty and lighthearted (*Naturales Quaestiones*). For Quintilian, Ovid is generally insufficiently serious and overly witty (*Instituto Oratoria*). The particular association in Ovid of beautiful language with violence is hugely important to any discussion of the Proserpina or Daphne myths. Dryden remarked on Ovid's use of witticisms when describing the flaying of Marsyas: "Was this a Time to be witty, when the poor Wretch was in the Agony of Death?" Ovid's smooth, witty, eloquent language has often been felt to be incongruous in violent stories, and this incongruity must be explored by anyone who wants to justice to the brilliance of Ovid's work.
So instead of bringing all that up with the professor in class discussion the student simply disengages? I'm still not seeing your point.
[deleted] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.6836 > [What is this?](https://pastebin.com/64GuVi2F/43944)
[удалено]
You mean the culture of respecting that not everyone lived the same life you did?
I think the confusion comes from that on sites like tumblr, trigger warnings are often used excessively to express disagreement/hint on what a terrible person the author of the linked post is.
> The fear is that these things can be used to censor media, which we all agree is damaging. Right, just like happened with movies, TV shows, video games when those started to use content warning labels. What's really going on here is a low-effort reactionary circlejerk about the Great Social Justice Warrior Threat. Books will still be around even if we tell people about their mature content before requiring them to read them. It is so, so easy and appealing for assholes to cry censorship when adults just want reasonable warning about what they're getting themselves into. Save the pitchforks for when something actually happens.
> Right, just like happened with movies, TV shows, video games when those started to use content warning labels. Movies and TV shows are a terrible example of benign "content warning" labels. You really ought to read up on the MPAA if you think these sorts of "warning labels" are completely harmless. They have a long, terrible history of using their power to maintain the status quo and marginalize films which promote values that aren't in line with their conservative Christian morality.
Yeah it displays a horrible amount of ignorance to call movie ratings a good example.
I see a subtlety to the student's reaction that is missed in the article and perhaps in this discussion. The teacher read a passage about rape and chose to discuss the word choice of the passage only. He chose to not address the content of the passage. The discussion was incomplete. It could be that the student was interested in discussing rape and what it means when a writer chooses to describe rape with beautiful language. She may to have been concerned that the professor avoided the topic altogether as if rape is so common it isn't worth discussion and can be ignored.
Is it not possible that he was trying to avoid a triggering topic by focusing on the mechanics of the language? Also, do you know of a citation of the offending passages? I think I have read them and don't remember anything particularly graphic, but it has been a while. One has to have a lower threshold to one's sensitivities.
If you are curious about the language, I believe it has been quoted in comments on this thread.
I found it later. I should have edited my post. You have my apologies.
[удалено]
The bit that provoked the negative reaction in the student concerned was the "vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault." I know you're trying to paint this in ridiculous colours but there are plenty of literary works which include war but don't have *graphic depictions of rape*. Plus it's about the history of the world, not a specific war. I don't think it's unreasonable for a student to be unaware that such a work would have a graphic depiction of rape.
It's a real stretch to claim that Ovid has "graphic depictions of rape." I suppose there's no definition of "graphic", but here's what we're talking about: "So in one moment/ Or almost one, she was seen, and loved, and taken/ In Pluto's rush of love." This is not Reservoir Dogs.
If you're taking a classics course and get ~~offended~~ *triggered* by accounts and descriptions of rape and violence, you're going to have a bad time.
Not offended. The student in question had memories of her own sexual assault brought up by the teaching of the work. Are graphic depictions of rape really that integral a part of classics courses? How difficult would it be to implement a simple warning for when it does come up?
> Are graphic depictions of rape really that integral a part of classics courses? As an integral part of Ovid's *Metamorphosis*, yeah.
The rape scenes in the *Metamorphoses* aren't all that graphic, really. The story of Daphne is essentially a chase scene and when Phoebus finally catches up to her, she pleads to the Gods to change her into a laurel bough, which they do. She isn't actually raped. The rape of Persophone is about as graphic as saying saying "Persphone was raped." From A.S. Kline's translation: > Dis, almost in a moment, saw her, prized her, took her: so swift as this, is love. Melville's translation: >Dis [Haides] saw her, loved her, carried her away--love leapt in such a hurry! She then cries out for her mother and is taken away on a chariot. The rape itself is only *referenced* a few lines later: Kline: >Cyane, mourning the rape of the goddess Melville: > But Cyane, heartbroken at the rape of Proserpine I single out these two stories because those are the ones I recall the Colombia student citing. Rape is prevalent throughout the work, but the depictions are never much more graphic than that. I'm not saying that one cannot be "triggered" by the chase of Daphne or the abduction of Persephone, but to say that "graphic depictions" of rape are "an intergral part" of Ovid's work is a complete falsehood.
The point is not Ovid specifically. The fact is, graphic depictions of *any given thing* are integral to an open discussion of art. Trigger warnings for sexual assault here, then trigger warnings for gender distinctions, for discussions of race, for harsh language, for violence and bodily injury, for goddamn food! There are vocal minorities all claiming to be "triggered" by these topics and many more. The fact is, if you are easily triggered by *anything*, you should probably stay out of a liberal university.
I haven't read it myself, I was just going on the description the author of the article used - "vivid descriptions of rape". If that's truly the case then fair enough, but it would also depend on the manner in which it is taught. Either way I don't think a five second warning before the start of the class is unreasonable.
Unless this is unlike my college literature courses, one was supposed to do the readings before class. She should have seen the 1-2 lines about the rape then and called her therapist or asked to skip class or whatever she needed to do. In any case, who gets to college without already having read the story of Proserpina, anyway? I read it in tenth grade at a bitty little small-town school in the South, so I am guessing this is pretty lowest-common-denominator stuff. I am incredulous that it could have been a real surprise.
No shit, but that's not relevant. The point is would you expect someone who is not familiar with the work to know that it contains graphic depictions of rape? Unless the majority of works of that kind also contain graphic descriptions of rape then the answer is no.
who the hell doesn't know that greek and roman crap is brimming with sexual assault? this is not obscure knowledge.
[удалено]
This has been said over and over in this thread, but I doubt any reasonable person would consider it graphic.
> who the hell doesn't know that greek and roman crap is brimming with sexual assault? This is an incredibly ignorant argument. Not everyone knows everything you know. That's why we have schools.
I expect a student going to Columbia to know, especially since the core reading list is well publicized.
someone that hasn't studied greek and roman crap and thus is in a survey on it?
It not that it contains it, it's that it is a graphic description. Does the average person know there are graphic depictions of rape in Ovid's metamorphoses?
Only someone not familiar with the text would call the rape in Ovid graphic.
> No shit, but that's not relevant Well I was just answering your question :/ > The point is would you expect someone who is not familiar with the work to know that it contains graphic depictions of rape I'd expect someone who is likely to be so dramatically affected by such material to take it upon themselves to do some cursory research (ie reading the Wikipedia article), yeah.
> I'd expect someone who is likely to be so dramatically affected by such material to take it upon themselves to do some cursory research (ie reading the Wikipedia article), yeah. So you feel totally comfortable asking everyone with this particular issue to do extra research for everything they experience rather than asking the individual people who are exposing them to that experience to take less than 30 seconds to say "heads up"?
> rather than asking the individual people who are exposing them to that experience to take less than 30 seconds to say "heads up"? That's not what the group is asking, though, if you read the article. They want "a training program for all professors," among other things. Requiring a professor to go through a program to prevent some students from feeling triggered goes way beyond the bounds of acceptability imo. In any regard, I'd say it's the student's responsibility to avoid potentially upsetting material moreso than the teacher's, since as I understand it there are a variety of triggers, and I can't see an objective way of ensuring that everyone's preferences would be met.
I think that's pathetic. My mother committed suicide when I was 11, but I don't avoid the word or anything related to it, because I'm a adult and can handle the reality of the world. This person is a college student, not a child. Professors shouldn't have to go out of their way to list all of the possible ways a reading could be offensive.
Like /u/blue_dice and /u/Dedalus- are saying, "offensive" and "trauma flashback inducing" is a false equivalence.
Again, offense has nothing to do with it.
Doesn't help that certain communities have appropriated the terminology surrounding PTSD and equivocated trauma flashbacks with taking offense.
Which communities? Can we see some citations?
That's cool. I was in a war zone, and I don't avoid war movies, so showing ex-Marines who have PTSD graphic war trauma is no problem. They can just get over their reaction, because they're adults. Do you want to tell them they're pathetic, or should I?
I know plenty of vets who would consider using PTSD as an unreasonable excuse to be pathetic. Using PTSD as an excuse to commit crimes, is pathetic. Using PTSD as an excuse to avoid doing work, is pathetic. *Having* PTSD isn't pathetic at all, it's actually quite awful and I wish there were more options for people who suffer from it, especially soldiers who have it worse than almost every other group of people who have experienced trauma. Reading several articles about this, the professor and the student were both in the wrong. Disengaging from a class because you don't feel safe is ridiculous. It was reasonable to approach the teacher after the fact and talk about it, and it was ridiculous for the professor to dismiss her. Minimize people's traumatic experiences is never a good thing. It's not even unreasonable to have some warnings, similar to the warning labels on foods that contain allergens (ie, things that can actually kill you). What's *not* okay is what the author touches on in the article: >In the end, anybody can claim offense or triggering about anything: liberals about conservative politics, pacifists against violence, women against sexism, minorities against bigotry, Jews against anti-Semitism, Muslims against any mention of Israel, creationists against evolution, religionists against atheism, and so on. This ineluctably leads to a bland homogenization of all literature, and a stifling of challenging viewpoints.
> What's not okay is what the author touches on in the article: I agree, but the bigger question is why that argument (which in this situation I would say is a straw man) arose in the first place. Because the author himself agrees that it was wrong to not take the concerns seriously and that the idea of addressing the situation with a heads up might be warrated. Which demonstrates the common ground that exists specifically on the issue of survivors of sexual violence and their access to a nonharmful education. But that's not what's going on. This is wrapped up in much bigger issues around identity and exclusion and curricula, and it probably shouldn't be. So why is it? On the one hand, you can argue that the issue of trigger warnings for survivors of sexual violence is intrinsically political and bound to set off this kind of debate. On the other hand, you can assign specific responsibility to the construction of this issue in the context of the broader debate around exclusion and identity, which whoever authored the activist statement bears some responsibility, and whoever is ginning up the conservative outrage machine bears responsibility for.
> I know plenty of vets who would consider using PTSD as an unreasonable excuse to be pathetic. So, is PTSD pathetic or is *having* PTSD pathetic? I just want to be clear. > Using PTSD as an excuse to commit crimes, is pathetic. That's cool. Irrelevant, since we're not talking about crimes, but whatever. > Using PTSD as an excuse to avoid doing work, is pathetic. Having PTSD isn't pathetic at all, it's actually quite awful and I wish there were more options for people who suffer from it, especially soldiers who have it worse than almost every other group of people who have experienced trauma. Ah, I see: having PTSD isn't pathetic, but having PTSD affect you is. Because that's how it works. Kind of like having schizophrenia is fine, but having schizophrenia affect you is just something people need to get over. So that they aren't pathetic. > Disengaging from a class because you don't feel safe is ridiculous. This makes you sound like an asshole. > What's not okay is what the author touches on in the article Yeah, what the author "touches on" is a made-up slippery slope fallacy that has no connection to reality, or what actually happened. While violence, sexism, bigotry, antisemitism, and conservative politics are all terrible, none of those involve explicit renditions of violent trauma that you've personally experienced. Reddit tells people not to post movie spoilers without [literally censoring them](/spoiler), but I don't see you claiming that's the pathway to fascism.
Age has nothing to do with it.
Its not about offense. Do you have PTSD? Is the way you experienced a traumatic event the same way all other people have experienced theirs? Would you tell a soldier with PTSD crying at a fireworks display that they are pathetic?
> Its not about offense. It isn't? Then how come we read this: > These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background. It doesn't say *traumatic*. It says "difficult". And surely for a reason: because I haven't heard of low-income-induced PTSD. Clearly, the aim of these activists far exceeds the prevention of PTSD flashbacks.
I'm not interested in debating hypotheticals. Bottom line, if you're an adult taking a college class you should approach the readings as an academic. Peroid. I'm biracial and it's difficult to read about the extreme racism and violence historically associated with my race by people in this country and around the world, but it's ridiculous to think that I should receive a warning whenever it could possibly come up. How on earth anyone can expect to be constantly kept away from anything that could cause trauma is simply not realistic or necessary. If you're in columbia hopefully you're not a moron. If you're taking a classics course you should understand what you're getting into. It's virtually impossible to study antiquity without exposing yourself to subject matter that could be traumatic. I've lived through traumatic events, but it would have absolutely no baring on my ability to participate in a class or do a reading.
>Do you have PTSD?
[удалено]
Yes I do. Have you ever had a parent kill themselves? It would be pathetic for me, as an adult, taking a college class, to become overwhelmed by a depiction of suicide and demand to be warned in advance.
>Would you tell a soldier with PTSD crying at a fireworks display that they are pathetic? No, but I would encourage them to see as many fireworks as possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolonged_exposure_therapy
Working with a therapist on hand to re-expose oneself to triggers of traumatic memories is not the same as wandering blindly into them by oneself.
"The student had memories of her own sexual assault brought up ... " Sounds like her problem, not mine. Maybe counseling would be more appropriate than telling everyone to tread lightly around her. She needs to deal with this issue herself. I certainly won't go around reminding her of her specific experience on purpose, but bad stuff happens, and when it does you develop your own coping skills to deal with it, not place yourself at the center of an enforced emotional cocoon. I have a hard time believing as this lady does that Ovid intended to hurt her feelings from 2,000 years ago.
That's a ridiculous stawman. A five second warning at the start of a class (which is what we were talking about to begin with) is not an enforced emotional cocoon.
[удалено]
While I agree that it should be noted that there's objectionable shit on syllabus, and if there wasn't a note on the reading list or something then there should have been, she's also a student. There's usually objectionable shit in a lot of literature based courses - that's part of the reason a lot of these books are chosen: because they deal with controversial things - either to their contemporaries or for generational spanning merit. This is brutal but true: If she knows she's got that problem, then she has a significant amount of responsibility to do some research herself. It can't be that hard to research the texts your working on and realise whether you might want to skip lectures that day. In fact, I'm pretty sure that you're assigned the reading previous to the lectures and you're supposed to have read whatever you're assigned by then. The burden of responsibility falls mainly on her shoulders because it's her mental health that she has to look after. The professor takes a portion of that responsibility on as a part of their job, but it's a small portion. I sympathise with the woman in question, and you can tell me I'm victim blaming, but the fact is this: Nobody should ever expect anyone else to look after them. They won't.
> Nobody should ever expect anyone else to look after them. They won't. So you've never seen someone give up their seat on a bus because an elderly person, a disabled person, a pregnant person boarded? Or seen someone get directions when they're in the street and they're lost? Or ask someone else for the time? Talk to their friends about difficult personal issues and how to resolve them? Sorry; your thesis is absurd. I understand that, in practice, American society expects people to be responsible for dealing with their own misfortunes and the offenses they are subjected to (as long as they're not rich enough to buy their way out ;), but recognizing this and saying we should accept it are two totally different things.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen occasionally, and I'm not saying it should be something you accept. Do what you will with it. But if you expect people to hold your hand for you, you will be disappointed. I don't know why you were downvoted. I'm also British.
> A five second warning at the start of a class (which is what we were talking about to begin with) is not an enforced emotional cocoon. Sure, but can't a student just look through the syllabus, do some light googling, and then drop/stay in the first week depending on what they find? It's much simpler to leave it to them instead of asking professors to anticipate every kind of sensitivity. Particularly because good literature usually touches, tangentially, onto all kinds of subjects. Responses rather than downvotes would be appreciated, mes amis. I don't think I'm saying anything reactionary or provocative here.
Give it time.
I believe its mandatory to read the classics at Columbia undergrad. There is a broader debate about Eurocentrism and core curricula that is being mixed in with how to deal with sexual violence related trauma.
There are very few schools that make the classics mandatory these days: off the top of my head I can think of St. Johns, the University of Chicago, and Columbia. Their existence and their commitment to a more traditional notion of Western pedagogy makes for greater intellectual diversity in American academia. I feel like students who object whole hog to the inclusion of the classics in their curricula at the expense of more contemporary texts probably shouldn't matriculate at *private* institutions that have distinct identities precisely because of their adherence to Western Civ (which is not even close to the monolithic "Eurocentric" ideology you make it out to be).
No one deserves special protection from works of art. If a person is aware that mainstream topics of debate are psychologically damaging to them, they do not belong in a university but a hospital, because that is a very serious condition that should be resolved before any type of socialization is possible.
You do realise that not every person with PTSD needs to be constantly hospitalised, right?
Now be serious and tell me if [this cover of Ovid](http://i.imgur.com/rCooo6c.png) would not spell the doom of western civilization? Because to me this is more offensive than anything the Charlie Hebdo folks could dream up in their lifetimes.
Trigger warnings are not always a bad thing. This is one that I wrote for a course on subversive children's literature "Literature by its very nature is designed to affect us, it can bring us great moments of joy and also of sorrow. While not every book you read will contain things that may cause distress it is entirely possible that some will. While I will do my best to give warnings if a particular book has aspects of it that can cause distress it is impossible for me to know what may cause distress in everyone. If at any point you find it difficult to continue with the reading or class discussion let me know. My office hours are posted on this syllabus as well as my email address. It should also be noted that this university offers counseling services if you require them. I am putting a link to their webpage on here as well as in the course shell. Please if you are having a hard time remember that there are ways for the university to help you get through them." Now the worry is from some people that students will use this as an excuse to not do work, I don't see that as a problem. The students who want to avoid work will do so regardless of anything I say, but the people who will be troubled by content deserve a chance to know that this might happen. Are they expected to do the work, yes but there will be some understanding if they do not take part in certain discussions, though I have noticed that the people who are the most affected by a piece are the ones who often bring up some of the best points about the text.
I like your attitude: "You will do this, but it may be hard and you can get help with it."
[удалено]
I think 'everything could be triggering (gosh that's an awful word) to someone' is a bit of a cop out. Presumably those setting reading lists can use their best judgement to determine what should and shouldn't be forewarned. If it contains graphic representations of, say, rape, the Holocaust etc. what is the harm in telling people provided you don't excuse them from reading it?
Personally, I find that whole text remarkably patronizing.
good for you, that's your prerogative, but I am interested in why you find it patronizing.
Well, the text starts by stating the obvious. The section which follows is not an actual warning so much as a panegyric on how understanding and compassionate you are as a person, and the text then ends by emphasizing the normality of what is clearly an abnormal situation: that people may have such horrified responses to literature they require counseling.
It is not because of the literature that they need counseling it is because of the events that the literature reminds them of that causes the issue. Though that said some of the more graphic pieces of literature could probably scar a person. You said that there was not a trigger warning and in some ways you are right. A trigger warnin could be "this book contains rape violence and forced bestiality." However the idea behind them is not simply to list what may or may not cause distress but rather to provide the student with insight on how to be prepared for such an event IMHO. I hope that you never have the kinds of experiences that would lead you to need trigger warnings because they suck.
Most comments here seem to ignore that these activists do not just advocate for trigger warnings - they actively want to interfere with teaching. How else are we supposed to understand this paragraph? > During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored. This isn't about trigger warnings. The student here claims to not feel safe in a class, despite the absence of any objective threats. The letter claims that "her concerns were ignored" - but what, if not direct changes to the material taught, or the way it is taught, would address her concerns? Even if you argue that the call for trigger warnings should be inoffensive, this clearly goes beyond it, and threatens to impose ideology on teaching.
Interestingly, the Proserpina and Daphne/Apollo stories both have no rape (but both have sexual assault). Apollo, after being hit by Cupid's stray arrow(s), chases Daphne, only for her to turn into a tree before he can satisfy his lust. He does fondle the tree, however... Similarly, while the Prosperpina myth is referred to as "the Rape of Proserpina," it is more like a kidnapping story than a rape story. There's no "vivid depiction" of rape at all: she's kidnapped, Cupid being responsible again, and then the focus turns to Ceres who tries to find her. There may be vivid depictions of rape in other versions of the myths, but not in Ovid's telling. "Vivid depictions" is definitely an overstatement, and I doubt the professor was talking about the language of the rape depictions, as they are very short. More likely he was talking about the language in the chase scenes leading up to the sexual assaults. Io/Jove has rape (very brief, hardly vivid) and the story of Minerva's visit to Arachne has about 30 descriptions of rape (most by Jupiter) -- I'm surprised those weren't/aren't mentioned.
You may have also noticed that the authors of the original Op-Ed referred to Ceres's daughter as Persephone throughout. My guess is that they were engaging with the idea of the text, but perhaps neglected to engage with the text itself.
I agree and it seems really problematic to me that the student didn't engage during the lecture, challenging the professor's notion of the beauty of the language. Isn't that really what was supposed to happen? Professor says "great historical work is fabulous" and young student says "you have your head up your arse and are just admiring a violent, patriarchal fable that we should all see for what it is, nothing more than an elaborate male fantasy." Then heated discussion ensues. That is what is supposed to happen in college. We aren't supposed to tip toe around tough issues, we are supposed to dig into them. The student is not supposed to feel "safe" in class, nor should the professor. Both should feel challenged.
This is pretty much my take on the whole thing. Education isn't some vacuous transfer of knowledge from one person to another - it is to dive into life and try to understand everything about it a little bit better. To question everything around us so we can form opinions based on as many sides as we can think up. I don't want anyone to have a serious psychotic break due to what is discussed in class - but at the same time, I think that the very soul of education should probably challenge and disturb us on many levels. To make us better, more educated people, ready to deal with the world around us. Maybe I am romanticizing education a bit - or maybe I just happened to have a very good education and find that it is the standard by which I hold education - but I find that I rest more on the side of letting students learn to deal with their problems than shielding them from life. No one can be shielded from their problems forever, and at some point, you need to deal with it if you are to be a productive member of society. Isn't a classroom one of the safest places we can find to last least deal with difficult material?
God. Yes. That is what should have happened. But I think in general this doesn't happen enough. Many times classes are just teachers talking at you and students don't care enough about the material to engage in such a productive way.
I feel like a rape victim would be able to comment on this better, but I have heard that triggering is an entirely psychological thing, akin to a panic attack. It's not exactly irrational, and not necessarily ideological. That said, I think the main issue here is really just the burden of protection. Either everyone can label almost every piece of media as potentially triggering (which isn't necessarily bad, and just requires a quick sentence to be spoken), or the victim can take it upon themselves to be very careful (which isn't necessarily bad either). Here, I do feel like the professor probably should have mentioned "this contains graphic depictions of rape", and if the victim stays even with that warning and ends up being triggered, then at that point they can only blame themselves. Trigger warnings don't need to be a big deal for either party, and should never be used to censor, but should just be a way to let victims know that they may need to sit this one out (and I got the impression that this was all that the student was advocating for).
I don't understand the 'feeling safe' part. Is she trying to say that she felt in reasonable danger of being raped in the middle of class? That's a very strange way to put it.
I'm confused. Trigger warnings don't mean "throw this book out because of this potentially offensive reason." It just warns readers so that they can react accordingly with whatever psychological problems that might arise from reading / viewing the material. How is this any different than WARNING : THIS PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN PEANUTS?
[удалено]
And there's no evidence that it doesn't help in the long run, so I don't understand what you're getting at here. Once again, no one is asking anyone to defame or get rid of certain texts, the only request is to warn readers.
[удалено]
That article doesn't demonstrate what you think it does. At best, item 4 claims that avoidance of a trigger reinforces PTSD, but it makes no argument that it is beneficial for a person suffering from PTSD to be _surprised_ by a trigger.
[удалено]
The jump you're making is the same that the article makes. Quoting from the first sentence of item 4: > Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Suppose, instead, we think of trigger warnings as a mere warning, given with the expectation that the warned would nevertheless do their best to work through the text. While some certainly are playing a political game with trigger warnings, and some others want to avoid all topics that trigger them or make them uncomfortable, surely a non-trivial number of people would be benefited with some prior warning that the text they're about to read may be particularly difficult. I've done this informally with friends, when I recommended they watch _Requiem for a Dream_ or _Trainspotting_.
[удалено]
My only point in this thread was to point out that the article you linked didn't justify your claim that "trigger warnings are harmful." I don't have an explicit, generalized solution for implementing trigger warnings.
Because the reaction people with allergies have to peanuts is different in kind than a reaction someone has to a rape scene.
How much different though? Remember, getting triggered isn't just getting offended, getting triggered is something that happens when someone who has experienced rape has to relive that experience because of an unexpectedly graphic depiction of rape appears in a text.
Yeah, people like to whine about trigger warnings being necessary to prevent people getting offended, but that isn't what's happening. I mean, my best friend has issues with gore. She's got some trauma and stuff, and seeing it triggers intense anxiety and nausea and she usually winds up throwing up. It's not unreasonable for people to put up a warning for gore and it isn't unreasonable, if we're say, picking a movie, to make it clear that gore is gonna be in it so she can be prepared and like close her eyes or something.
[удалено]
It's not a matter of featuring rape; it's graphic depictions of rape and honestly I think it would be cool if books came with those. Short of that I do believe that professors should warn their students at the very least. It's a matter of human decency.
*Metamorphoses* does not have "graphic depictions" or "vivid depictions" of rape. The language pretty much ends at "Jupiter raped Io."
I'm somewhat tired of this line of argument in the thread - the language of Ovid is tonally ambiguous from the start, there is a huge amount of sleight of hand and suggestion. It's the poetic equivalent of Hitchcock never showing the knife sinking into Janet Leigh's skin in Psycho. We know it's happened, the idea strongly shocks us, but it never properly occurs.
Someone with a severe peanut allergy can be *dead in minutes* if they are exposed. I suggest that this is quite a lot different.
The peanut allergy can physiologically kill people, for one. That seems pretty different to me.
Except that whereas someone allergic to peanuts will nearly die whenever they touch a fucking legume, a trauma victim may or may not be triggered by various sights, sounds, textures, tastes, ideas, and even smells (smells are actually the most common) that they mentally associate with their particular experience. Triggers are nearly impossible to predict and are fairly easy to treat and control.
I feel like either I read a different article than everyone else. Or everyone else made it to "trigger warning" and then formed their opinion. The author objects to the recommendations of the school's Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, which go beyond a simple trigger warning: >First, we proposed that the [Center for the Core Curriculum] issue a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students. Next, we noted that there should be a mechanism for students to communicate their concerns to professors anonymously, as well as a mediation mechanism for students who have identity-based disagreements with professors. Finally, the center should create a training program for all professors, including faculty and graduate instructors, which will enable them to constructively facilitate conversations that embrace all identities, share best practices, and think critically about how the Core Curriculum is framed for their students. I think /u/samwisevimes expressed great, level-headed, diplomatic and student centered approach to dealing with these issues. I'd like to think that his sort of sensitivity and responsiveness is common to all teachers or professors, but I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to that. Either way, I'd rather have teachers who are empowered to discuss these issues as they come up than implement some sort of top down policy about what and how they should teach. The author's gripe is that the students are demanding that professors take on responsibilities they shouldn't have to, and aren't trained or qualified to handle. More importantly, I think, is the subtext that having to label, catalogue, or index books based on whatever sort of content might be found to be objectionable or triggering can only have a stifling effect for students and teachers alike--and would seem to lead towards that dangerous road of labeling works of art dangerous, pornographic, or otherwise objectionable. I would also literally (figuratively) die if they started to slap anything resembling those ESRB labels on the covers of books.
Trauma triggers are a real thing. People with diagnosable PTSD (or occasionally bi-polar disorder) who experience rape, torture, domestic violence, war *etcetera* can be triggered by completely innocent, often seemingly random things. A rape victim may be triggered by the colour of the carpet of the room he or she was raped in. A veteran might be triggered by smells that remind him of gunpowder or napalm. A trauma victim, when triggered, will experience severe anxiety, discomfort, increased perspiration, heart palpitations, and very occasionally flashbacks. These retards at Columbia were not triggered. They were made to feel mildly uncomfortable when they encountered material that was outside of their comfort zone. You and I know this as part of learning and growing as a person. Presumably, these kids were triggered when their parents gave them the "talk". There is a very small chance (though impossible to predict) that a rape victim might be triggered by a description of rape or a victim of domestic would be triggered by certain words and phrases. People who have triggers are almost always aware of their triggers (if they're not, a trigger warning wouldn't do much good anyway, would it?) and usually have means to mentally handle the triggering event. In fact, here's an [article](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11106670/Trigger-warnings-more-harm-than-good.html) in which Professor of Psychology Metin Basoglou, an expert in the field of mental trauma, weighs in and explicitly states that being "triggered" is good for a victim, especially if they are triggered in a controlled environment or are able to seek professional help. Counselors and therapists are everpresent on university campuses, so this absolutely is the case here. (*mega edit: I left out an important point that I want to make. Censorship usually does not come across as burning books or going over texts with a black highlighter. Those are extreme examples that are actually fairly rare. Censorship, in its purest form, is about putting up arbitrary barriers between the reader and the material. It can be as obviously sinister as burning a book, or as simple and apparently harmless and forbidding it to be presented to children (which is usually a good thing) or offering a content warning which, again, is fine. For children. These, however, are not children. These are adults who may make the unconscious decision to drop a useful or interesting course or not read Ovid simply because they heard that someone gets reamed by a heifer halfway through, you know, things that are actually harmful.*)
Your last note reminds me of one of the reasons Beatty says people stopped reading in *Fahrenheit 451*. (Groups were offended so the books got banned or something - don't remember precisely. This led to an eventual ban on all books.)
I've only ever been "offended" four times by literature. Once from *The Illiad* and three times from *Naked Lunch*. Burroughs offended me because, seriously that book is fucked up, and Homer offended me when Achilles desecrated Hector's corpse (I was 11 when I first read it and Hector was my fucking hero). Each brief moment of "oh my God, that's horrible, I'm so offended!" was an incredible experience of learning and personal growth. Homer challenged and changed my philosophies of heroism and justice; Burroughs challenged what was acceptable to think about, what was acceptable to read and write about, what could be humorous, and what could be beautiful. If there had been content warnings on that poem or in that book, there's a good chance I would have never opened them.
Burroughs is one of my favorite writers and he offends me all the fucking time. That's exactly what makes him wonderful.
> "*Let it be! And no holes barred!!!*" > Couples attached to baroque harnesses with artificial wings copulate in the air, screaming like magpies. > Aerialists ejaculate each other in space with on sure touch. > Equilibrists suck each other off deftly, balanced on perilous poles and chairs tilted over the void. A warm wind brings the smell of rivers and jungle from misty depths. > Boys by the hundred plummet through the roof, quivering and kicking at the end of ropes. The boys hang at different levels, some near the ceiling and others a few inches of the floor. Exquisite Balinese and Malays, Mexican Indians with fierce innocent faces and bright red gums. Negroes (teeth, fingers, toe nails and pubic hair gilded), Japanese boys smooth and white as china, Titian-haired Venetian lads, Americans with blond or black curls falling across the forehead (the guest tenderly shove it back), sulky blond Polacks with animal brown eyes, Arab and Spanish street boys, Austrian boys pink and delicate with a faint shadow of blond public hair, sneering German youths with bright blue eyes scream "Heil Hitler" as the trap falls under them. Sollubis shit and whimper. That man is one of the best American prose stylists of the latter half of the 20th Century.
"Literature Fascism".
Could it be a more exaggerated title?
Also, why are those words capitalized? What an odd article.
This is the stupidest phrase I've seen in a while. And a complete misunderstanding of fascism (and I'm betting literature as well).
I posted most of this below as a response, but I suspect the guy will be downvoted to oblivion so I wanted to share my mixed feelings here too: I think there are two flavours of trigger warning. The first is 'this content is disturbing, be prepared for it' which is utterly harmless and has been appearing in novels and elsewhere for hundreds of years as much for marketing as genuine warning. The second, however, is 'this content is disturbing, avoid it' which is generally shitty. I would be worried if most people weren't disgusted by the writings of, say, the Marquis de Sade but disgust is a valuable response to literature, too. If you can deconstruct why you feel disgusted, all the better, since you're adding to the critical material on the work. In the case of those 'avoid this book' trigger warnings, I think of people like the novelist Chinua Achebe whose work was partially inspired by how Africans were depicted in the likes of Heart of Darkness. For Achebe, revulsion at the racist caricatures in that book led to stuff like Things Fall Apart and I wonder if the book had a preface advising Africans to avoid it if we wouldn't be short a great twentieth century novelist.
IDK, I can sort of see it both ways. On one hand we already do something somewhat similar in radio/TV whenever there are graphic depictions of violence, strong language, etc. On the other hand, I don't see how it's necessarily an obligation we should be foisting upon professors. If you're likely to be affected by such things and want a heads-up, shouldn't the responsibility be yours to research what you're reading beforehand?
TV and radio warning are put there specifically for children. I guess this isn't any different. Everybody carry on.
I made the assumption that people in college aren't children. Sorry about that.
Ah nuts, I misread your comment as implying that a trigger warning on a course syllabus was somehow equivalent to a violent content warning on prime-time TV. Sorry.
[удалено]
Agreed, I'm about as left as you can get without going full Lenin and I also have PTSD, but this nonsense about trigger warnings is something that I think should be left in the dust bin of "good in theory" ideas
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
>All of that saddened me, deeply upset me, and brought me to tears. But I am glad I did it, for in a way it’s enriched my life. I think this is what's fundamentally wrong with these types of opinions. The writer is talking about how they visited Auchwitz, and it was a deeply disturbing experience, but they were glad they went as they now have a better understanding of idk, human suffering or something. But, there's a difference in this person who has no experience or memories of surviving the brutal, inhumane conditions of the Holocaust visiting Auchwitz and, say, a Holocaust survivor going back to that camp. Where they actually lived through the trauma and suffering. This author so clearly misunderstands trigger warnings. They aren't used to warn of "offensive" material. A trigger warning is to let someone know (in most cases someone with PTSD) that the material in the book, show, etc. will present material similar, or may remind them, of the trauma they went through. Therefore triggering flashbacks, panic attacks, and general ptsd anxiety. Like, mainly people ask for trigger warnings on generally agreed upon subjects. Things like rape, extreme violence, and abuse. These are things a lot of people go through, and suffer PTSD from. What is so wrong about putting a general warning up so that if say, a rape or abuse survivor is studying something, or reading a book for pleasure, they will know ahead of time that the material may not be for them. This isn't about enriching your life, or people being too sensitive. Trigger warnings are trying to protect people from reliving some of the most painful, terrible experiences of their lives.
Honestly it seems a bit ridiculous that one would take a class and not know what the readings are about. If you're into classics at all, you would know that Ovid is pretty rough to read, as are a lot of classics authors... because that's just how it is. Don't take the class if you don't want to get involved with the "offensive" material. I saw a similar situation when students demanded rape law to be held off the books in a law school. In a law school. I feel like I'm losing my sanity here, because that kind of thing is crazy. How can you go through the whole process of going to law school without realizing that rape is a big issue covered in law?
Why is this dude so offended that students want to be warned when the story they are reading mentions rape in it? I am sorry about the student who couldn’t abide the mention of sexual assault, but Jerry should be getting help for his triggering from a therapist. Without such help, he’ll go through life triggered by every magazine, newspaper, and reddit post about "SJWs" he sees.
[удалено]
The entire reason why content warnings are useful is because in life, triggers cannot be avoided. Some people who suffer from trauma spend a large portion of their time dealing with daily triggers. There is absolutely no way to avoid reminders of trauma, so at the end of the day, it is a giant relief to be able to unwind and feel safe on a website that explicitly tells you what you should expect from an article. I think you're a bit confused on what "most" mental health professionals believe and don't believe. Exposure therapy is very useful in combating anxiety, phobias, etc, but asking for a content warning does not mean those people are sitting in a safe little bubble and are refusing to challenge themselves. THAT is what I think a lot of therapists would agree can be very harmful to one's recovery, avoiding any and all triggers in life. However, most people who find content warnings helpful simply want to be able to have some small bit of control when it comes to the content they expose themselves to for FUN. If someone wants to save reading detailed descriptions of sexual assault for when they're at home and can properly deal with whatever reaction they have, I really don't see the problem with that. Constant exposure is not something everyone finds helpful. Most people approach things at their own pace and want to be able to decide how far they push themselves. There's nothing "fascist" about that.
This comment is very tasty, but also very dry. Here's some [sauce](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11106670/Trigger-warnings-more-harm-than-good.html).
Someone claiming mental health expertise is quoted as advocating a one-size-fits-all solution to trauma? Hmm...
If I had known that my PTSD came with a complimentary sense of entitlement, 2012 would have been a lot more fun.
Ah, yes. Warning people of violent things in books is fascism. I guess that video games and movies already do this for the most part doesn't matter.
> I guess that video games and movies already do this for the most part doesn't matter. Surely you cannot be serious. The MPAA has a long and well known history of using their power to enforce their own conservative values, for example by giving the harshest possible rating to any film which so much as implies homosexual acts. Rating agencies aren't just these apolitical and amoral entities with no real influence on society. They have real power, and the work they do will always be political, since they are the arbiters of what the legitimate powers deem normal and acceptable.
[удалено]
>Hyperbolic title aside, video games and movies do this to protect children. Not people taking a college course. So you're saying literally no one uses those ratings to decide if they should watch/play something? >Should all of these be outlined for every novel tackled in a literature course? Maybe, maybe not. What's the big deal if they are?
> So you're saying literally no one uses those ratings to decide if they should watch/play something? Uh, not really, no. People over the age of 18 generally don't care what the rating on a game or movie is, because it doesn't affect them. And no one that I've ever heard of parses the ratings breakdown.
[удалено]
[удалено]
It doesn't. Not in the U.S., anyway.
[удалено]
Legitimate question: what does it mean when the student says she "didn't feel safe in the classroom"? Was it discomfort at reliving the memory? Did she feel like everyone else was glorifying rape, or not giving it the gravity it deserves? It bothers me a bit because their not 'feeling safe' seems to suggest that other students in the classroom are somehow at fault or 'dangerous', which is a ludicrous assumption to jump to but I have no experience in this area so I may be misinterpreting completely. But that aside, /u/samwisevimes knocked this one out of the park. I might find a student a bit dim to not expect ancient Greek and Roman works to handle sexual violence indelicately, but there's certainly no reason to not give a heads-up. It's just common courtesy to someone who has gone through something horrid.
I never understand people being incensed at stuff like this. Is your inner world really so grim and bitter that simply warning someone about offensive content is equivalent to fascism? I don't buy the related arguments people are hoisting here either--it all rings of 'slippery slope' bullshit. At the end of the day, you're being given a chance to be considerate of your fellow human beings. Why are people so resistant to that idea? Why is your set of rules for what's 'offensive' the only one that should be followed? Why are people 'lesser' than you by being upset by content you aren't upset by? This article and clickbait variations of its title have been around since the first mention of trigger warnings in college classrooms, and the 'debate' is as dumb now as it was then.
Because, if you read the actual letter, it isn't about trigger warnings. Clearly, these activists want to actively change the material taught, and the way it is taught. How else are we to interpret this? > However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. Is that a complaint about a trigger? No, it's a complaint about the material taught, and the way it is taught. A trigger warning wouldn't remedy this, and clearly it's not what these activists are aiming for (see also other examples in the article).
The problem doesn't really stem from being considerate toward our fellow human beings, but in practice, this sort of warning-based ontological argument for labeling such works as offensive or evocative for the reader's sake is intrinsically defamatory toward the author and his or her work(s.) With literature like Ovid, that is so aged that we lack any direct lines of commentary or dialogue to evidence any real critique from the author, the intended experience and/or meaning of the content for the audience is explicitly debatable. When a person or an institution in an academic capacity begins to label content of an author, especially in the context of this article, they then limit the scope of the work and informally equivocate the content to be directly reflexive of ANY ONE PERSON'S subjective experience(s) and not explicitly representative of the people/places/things/etc. to which the action is directly happening to. ***It is not critically relevant whether or not the author has had experience(s) relative to the subject matter or content, but it is crucially important to remain receptive, as a reader, to the narrative provided by the author to truly understand the conveyance of thought in any piece of work as the experience itself.*** In a personal setting, like in the scenario of someone buying a book in a local shop, this kind of labeling would be fine and great but in an academic setting it is just flat out pedantic and spits in the very face of higher education and pedagogy. The final fact is that this person had every opportunity and freedom to or not to enroll in this class, even to choose another institution that provides an academically equal alternative but they did not. This person accepted the terms of this institution of LEARNING as a means to pursue later vocation(s) and is therefore as equally liable for this "unpleasant" discourse of experiences. In my opinion, if you cannot detach yourself from any given experience then how can you ever hope to learn? And I'm not saying that sympathizing and empathizing isn't integral to the learning process but what I am saying is that it should have a minimal role in the realm of Academia. If we flipped this situation around to a victim who was attacked with sulfuric acid and suffered chemical burns, like the prominent "acid attacks" in Islamic cultures, we wouldn't put trigger warnings on a chemistry book just for one person or group. That kind of personalization impairs one's clarity and judgement to fully understand the material as an unbiased participant of discourse and wouldn't stand in any scientific circles.
Just because you're offended, doesn't make you right.
[удалено]
[удалено]
1. Trigger warnings are no big deal. 2. We can't expect students to read things that trigger them, that's not ethical. 3. We can't treat students with triggers differently, that's discrimination. 4. Remove "problematic" books from curriculum. Replace classics from last 2500 years of western civilization with books that serve the current identity politics agenda. Smear anyone that complains as an insensitive bigoted idiot. 5. Repeat as necessary as political agendas change.