If, in your lifetime as a reader, you've ever read Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Mark Twain, or others, and didn't feel emotionally harmed in the process, you might have escaped a horrible fate--of feeling.
According to the New York Times, colleges are struggling with requests from students (and others) to affix a 'Trigger Warning' in a syllabus regarding texts which might instigate an adverse reaction or emotional trauma to the reading material--for any reason. Colleges and universities like Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and George Washington University have all instituted rules regarding these 'Trigger Warnings,' which has some people concerned that things have gotten out of hand.
Says the Times:
"The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide)."
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| Chinua Achebe realizes he just triggered himself. |
As the tide toward being overly-sensitive to literary texts gets excessive, professors--who are usually overtly sensitive to texts' potential to offend--are now fighting back. Oberlin College released a guide which suggested professors mark up a syllabus with 'Trigger Warnings' in case any text might offend a student.
Continues the Times:
“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the [Oberlin] guide said. “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.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”
If you've experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, and suicide in your life, not only do you need to reexamine what you did to piss off a variety of religious deities, but you're also going to be a millionaire once you get that memoir published. But I digress.
Pause for a moment to think of Oberlin's logic regarding Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart." Achebe's novel is something "everyone in the world should read," but--hey, not everyone everyone. Just everyone with a pathological inability to feel human emotion.
Since being emotionally cold and distant to literature isn't really how reading works, some are arguing against 'Trigger Warnings,' like Jill Filipovic at London's The Guardian, who writes:
"College isn't exactly the real world either, but it's a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text. It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student's world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges – not a place that contracts to meet the student exactly where they are."
Except college is becoming an intellectual vacuum--at least in the humanities departments--where professors fear the wrath of offending students with literary choices, even if those choices lead to enlightening discussion and collective examination of broader topics by the entire class.
Don't believe me? Professor Marc Blecher tells the Times:
“If I were a junior faculty member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified. [...] Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards, and create a very tortuous process for anyone.”
"Torture."
And, so, the triggering cycle begins. A book triggers an unpleasant emotional response in a student...who files a complaint with the university...who sends the faculty member to meetings and judicial boards...who decide the professor was egregious with their literary selection by not realizing the depth of triggering response potential...so the board places the professor on some sort of academic probation...causing the faculty member to be traumatized (because they aren't tenured and are only making $32,000 a year without health benefits, and the rent's due)...so the following semester the teacher can't bring themselves to create a class syllabus with any meaningful text...and are frightened by the sight of stacks of blank syllabi...and, thus, incapacitated and incapable of doing their job, so their employment is terminated.
The circle of life.
photo: mije.org
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