Trigger warning: This article is not here to celebrate safe spaces.
It was a breath of fresh air when the University of Chicago announced in its welcome letter to the class of 2020 that it would not permit the coddling of college-aged students and the censorship of open discussion. It’s been said many times, but it needs to be said again that a student’s emotions and the fear of “microaggressions” cannot be a college’s grounds to prevent the free flow of speech.
Trigger warnings are statements warning an audience of potentially distressing material, and this often allows students to opt out of a complete education.
For example, Jeannie Suk, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in an essay that was published in The New Yorker that law students who request trigger warnings preceding discussion of sexual assault cases prevents the students from learning about an important subject in criminal law. According to Suk, around a dozen new teachers of criminal law have told her that rape law is not something they will cover in their courses, because doing so is not worth the complaints and anxiety by students.
She goes on to say that a teacher she knew was asked by a student to not use the word “violate” in class, even in the context of something as simple as “this violates the law.”
Often, trigger warnings are issued to deal with microaggressions. What is a microaggression? This is a term meant to describe an implied disrespect. Imagine if someone capitalized the word “indigenous” in the middle of a sentence on a research paper and you, being a teacher concerned about capitalization rules, marked that it should not be capitalized. The overly sensitive student, fearing semblances of marginalization, would call this a microaggression. Does this seem too off-the-wall to be true? Not so. It happened in UCLA and was grounds for a student sit-in.
With the way that microaggressions are treated on many a college campus, it seems that they’ve grown more macro than normal agressions themselves. A trigger warning is not an appropriate remedy.
To be sure, there are certain situations that deserve the attention of trigger warnings, such as those regarding serious mental and emotional conditions, but not every instance of microaggression requires the option to skip out on a bit of education, and not every bit of sensitive material can be safely kept out of a high-tier course. Is it fair to devote a trigger warning to a rape law necessary in a criminal law education when trigger warnings were meant for World War I soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder? It’s reductive and disrespectful.
We, as a school, value intellectual stimulation, pushing beyond comfort zones to broaden our understanding of the world and the context in which history has placed us. This is the goal of any worthwhile academic institution, not to pad every controversial statement and sanitize our education as if the world we will find when we emerge from the scholastic fortress is one, big neutered safe space.
At SHS, we read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to better grasp class and racial bigotry, even if doing so requires slogging through the N-word. We learn about abolition and the women’s rights movement so that we recognize how far we’ve come with our improving democratic system, even if doing so reveals our countless past injustices.
We know that we do not need safe spaces and trigger warnings, even if doing so — or because doing so — gives us the chance at a more authentic education.
