Earlier this week the New York Times wrote an article about college students seeking trigger warnings on course content, which has lead to a whole bunch of ink spilled on why my generation is all whiny children. I think a lot of the discussion is overblown – is it really worth this much fuss when what we’re talking about is a handful of words added to the syllabus, no more intrusive than “viewer discretion advised” before some TV shows? (Kat Stoeffel ponders that further here in a good rebuttal to some of the hand-wringing about fragile Millennials.) So I don’t have much to add, but there’s something I’ve seen underneath some of this discussion that I want to bring to the front.
The assumption I’ve seen under a lot of anti-trigger-warning arguments is that not only should students be able to discuss disturbing topics in a rational, detached way, but they ought to be able to do so at the drop of a hat. (Thus, no warnings.) The implication is that anyone who has an emotional response to that content, and who needs time to process it, is weak; these articles seem to assume that academia is an emotion-free zone. I just don’t think that’s true.
The point of studying anything isn’t just to coolly absorb as many facts as possible. The point is to learn how to understand the world in order to make it better, and doing that requires acknowledging and dealing with emotions. The idea that acknowledging that the things we talk about in class can be upsetting undermines academic integrity somehow seems to me to be asking us to exclude a whole world of knowledge and experience from our analysis.
When people argue against having a warning on a book that it include a rape scene, it seems to me that they want to be able to discuss rape as a hypothetical without acknowledging that it affects real people’s lives, and probably some lives right there in the classroom. But we gain very little by taking the harmful things of the world out of context; acknowledging the context, and the emotional baggage that comes with them, gives us a chance to learn from other people’s experiences.
A small warning that tells students what to expect might facilitate that. It’s probably not the end of the conversation about how to address sensitive material in class. But the call for detachment that seems to underlie arguments against trigger warnings strikes me as hostile to emotion in a way that excludes what we should be trying to incorporate and understand.