Comedian Louis CK once said, “Offending people is a necessary and healthy act. Every time you say something that’s offensive to another person, you just caused a discussion. You just forced them to have to think.”
Thinking and having discussions seem like activities perfectly suited to college. That’s probably why there has been heated response to Jennifer Medina’s May 18 article in The New York Times entitled “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm.” Medina reported on the rising trend of student organizations and governments at colleges across the country calling for mandatory “trigger warnings” on course syllabi, which would warn students that they may be exposed to upsetting material in everything from textbooks to classic literature.
The concept of trigger warnings started out on the Internet, where it is mostly harmless if bloggers want to cater to what Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg brilliantly calls “boutique anxieties.” But the fact that we are actually discussing the slapping of warning labels on material in college is horrifying to me.
This idea has been formally proposed at the University of California Santa Barbara, where there is a large veteran population. In some contexts, it makes sense to warn students who have genuine Post-Tramautic Stress Disorder because of wartime experiences or severe physical or sexual assault history that they may be exposed to upsetting things in class. But how many students does that actually apply to? And how many of them are signing up for classes where specifically offending material is presented?
This is a call for actions that seriously pave the road to censorship and would only benefit a small number of students who could be approached on an individual basis.
And let’s face it, most trigger warnings are not about the seriously traumatized among us. They’re about people who get big attention boners from pretending the world is victimizing them or people who want their fragile life-view affirmed by an institute of higher education. Do you think I’m being harsh? Check out the draft guide for trigger warnings from Ohio’s Oberlin College, which includes things like heterosexism, colonialism and “issues of privilege and oppression.” The guide instructs college professors to “realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.”
Well aren’t you guys just special, delicate snowflakes. Your professors might have Ph.D.s but they could never be enlightened enough to understand your suffering.
Of course, attacking Oberlin’s draft guide is like kicking a dead horse when it’s down because they have already rescinded it. As Goldberg puts it, they probably realized they were leaving teachers with absolutely nothing to talk about. Trigger warning: all of history.
In case you’re wondering, I am a lifelong liberal and feminist, and I wholeheartedly believe in equality. Unfortunately, liberalism seems to have been hijacked by this extreme, absurdist culture where there is no room for freedom of expression, open dialogue or the challenging of world views that most of these college students adopted as teenagers.
Many conservatives refer to college as a “liberal indoctrination factory.” Most of us have the inclination to roll our eyes and feel some kind of second-hand embarrassment for anyone who would say such a thing to cover up for their own lack of education or knowledge about the world. Then you hear about student groups that want to label The Merchant of Venice for anti-Semitism and The Great Gatsby for misogyny and you think, well … thanks for giving fuel to the right wing’s fire.
Luckily, I haven’t heard much discussion of actual trigger warnings at Portland State, but I have noticed a distinct lack of allowance for history. I have been in classes at PSU where literary works from decades past have been attacked for containing racial slurs by students who were upset at having to read them. I have been admonished for defending female characters who were offensive because they wore dresses and wanted to get married, like the majority of female characters in the past thousand years of the written word. I do worry that students don’t understand that a work can be valuable even if it reflects the archaic views of the past instead of fitting inside a perfectly politically correct 2014 box of things that don’t horrify you.
Spoiler alert: The world is still not perfect. If you are too offended by misogyny to be exposed to it in a classroom then I suggest never leaving the house. Same goes for most of the negative things that these fragile flowers can’t handle. Instead of protesting and challenging ideas and actions that upset us or facing our traumatic experiences head on, this generation wants everyone else to accommodate their space so they can pretend the bad things don’t exist.
As Danielle Henderson of The Stranger said, “It’s strange to go through life assuming every space is suitable for you, and if it isn’t then you can do something to change it so that it is. That’s just fundamentally untrue, and a new level of privilege I can’t even comprehend.”
I don’t get a big attention boner from telling you my traumatic experiences in life, but rest assured, I do have them. I have been in rooms where jokes made me uncomfortable because of things I’ve dealt with in the past. But do I want to change what people joke about? No. They have the freedom to say what they want, and I know jokes don’t reflect how someone really feels about a topic. I’ve been in classrooms where someone said something I considered really ignorant and harmful based on my own experience. Do I get upset and leave? No. That’s a perfect opportunity for a discussion in which different points of view can be shared.
I think one of the commenter’s on Goldberg’s column said it best when they quoted Denis Leary, another comedian, “Life sucks. Get a helmet.”