THROWDOWN THURSDAY: Trigger Warning!

By JULIUS KAIREY

Warning: Article may contain principled defenses of free speech as well as ideas and language that may be considered offensive to some readers. Read at your own risk.

One symptom of the hypersensitivity slowly rotting away at liberal education in America is the recent push for trigger warnings. If some students get their way, objectionable material in classroom lectures, discussions and presentations would include warning messages. Giving in to such demands, schools like Oberlin College have instructed faculty to scrub their syllabuses of offensive material that does not contribute directly to the course learning goals. Like proponents of the closely-linked speech code movement, trigger warning advocates equate controversial speech with violence in order to make it seem more regulable. This is a natural extension of a worldview that instructs students to prefer intellectual safety and security over a rigorous educational experience. In this paradigm, the quest for truth is deemed less important than making sure the wrong views are not heard.

When listening to the advocates of trigger warnings attempting to make their case, the careful listener is immediately struck by their boundless capacity for self-pity. They incessantly demand that society recognize their pain and acknowledge their status as a victim. Underlying this mindset is a paranoid fear that certain privileged societal groups are out to get them. Consequently, they cry oppression while censoring the speech of others and some universities are letting them get away with it. The same organizations that once wanted to keep administrators out of the business of regulating speech are now begging, even demanding, that they intervene. To give just one example, hundreds of students and faculty at Miami University last year demanded the university cancel a scheduled speech by syndicated columnist George Will.

A safe campus is a sterile one where we would lose what makes our universities great: innovative thinking, creativity, and a willingness to boldly reach for the next frontier.

The irony of this movement is that it bases its claims on the need to protect certain minorities from discrimination. They most aggressively target speech (and speakers) deemed racist or sexist, supposedly to protect groups they consider particularly vulnerable. Yet, there is a certain bigotry inherent in their line of reasoning. Trigger warning proponents unjustly portray minorities as uniquely fragile and incapable of dealing with controversial and hotly contested issues. They are rarely asked why their own degraded perception of minorities is not tantamount to the racism they so eagerly denounce.

It should hardly be surprising that such policies end up encouraging students to frequently claim offense. The taking of offense is an entirely subjective and utterly manipulable standard, such that a student cannot be made to prove that he really is offended by something he sees or hears. By enabling students to change the behavior of others by demanding to feel safe, students are encouraged to avoid the tough issues raised in class and retreat to the comforts of identity politics and victimization theory. Students must prove themselves capable of an education that prepares them for reality.

Professors have particular cause for concern with the rising popularity of this movement. The burden will naturally fall on them to ensure that students are not triggered from the contents of their lectures and assigned readings. This is an impossible task. Faculty members cannot possibly know the varied personal experiences of each student that could cause them to find material particularly objectionable. Should they refrain from giving a hypothetical involving a house fire for fear that a student might have experienced one? How about teaching law regarding violent assault or rape? It will become increasingly difficult for professors to teach and for students to learn in a context that puts student sensibilities above a free academic environment.

It is not entirely true that trigger warning proponents want the university to closely regulate all speech. Their speech is exempted. The right not to be censored is only conferred on those with the correct ideas. It is precisely the politicization and selective application of hypersensitivity that threatens to make our universities closed to those with unpopular ideas.

Imagine the Bible with warnings like may include homophobia and novels like Huckleberry Finn with the declaration may include racism. And why not make our campus an even safer space by removing such books entirely? After all, who knows if an impressionable young freshman might one day wander into the library, only to be traumatized by these books while innocently browsing the catalog? Do his sensibilities not deserve to be protected?

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THROWDOWN THURSDAY: Trigger Warning!