The 1950s image depicts a husband bending his wife over his lap as he spanks her. “Women!” it’s captioned. “Know your place.”
Jared Roberts, a doctoral student in counseling at George Washington University, used the picture in a psychology course he taught last year to show gender roles from an earlier generation. Students in his class on adult development and aging would be doing community service in senior-citizen centers, he says, and interacting with people who were in their prime during the era the picture represented.
But for Ariella Neckritz, a senior who has worked with victims of sexual assault, the picture was offensive. She worried that it could be traumatic for people who had experienced relationship violence. “I approached the professor after the class and said, ‘I recognize that you’re trying to show how views have changed over time, but I would suggest picking a different photo,’ " she said in an interview. “Or, if he really wanted to keep that photo, I thought he could say, ‘The next photo I’m using shows physical violence, and I want to let everyone know.’ "
Mr. Roberts hasn’t used the image since then. But he worries about what may have been lost. “It’s a fine line to balance and appreciate the discomfort that can come from approaching difficult issues,” he says, “and at the same time leaving them out at the expense of preparing students for professional and real-life experiences.”
Debate over trigger warnings is raging. Are they necessary to protect victims of trauma? Or do they coddle young adults who have become overly sensitive about life experiences?
The warnings first appeared mostly on blogs and other online forums, often to alert people to content related to sexual assault. Now, in the past year or so, trigger warnings are becoming a frequent request on campuses. Students are pressing their professors to use warnings in the classroom for a range of issues — sexual violence, suicide, abortion, racism.
When those subjects arise during readings, lectures, or videos, students want professors to draw attention to them in advance. That way students can prepare themselves or skip class and ask for an alternative assignment.
In response to these new requests, some professors are accommodating students by issuing warnings or are simply eliminating highly sensitive material from class. Others are struggling with how to continue to present delicate material, in a way that either attempts to limit how offensive some students might find it or that allows students to opt out. Like Mr. Roberts, most instructors want to be sensitive. But many worry that leaving out frank discussions of difficult topics could sap the educational impact of their courses and squander an opportunity to have candid dialogue about critical issues.
So far, most of the decisions are being made professor by professor and classroom by classroom. The number of syllabi that carry trigger warnings is still in the minority, and colleges have turned back calls for campuswide mandates on trigger warnings.
Freedom and Discomfort
At Oberlin College last year, however, a panel of professors, staff members, and students working on the college’s Sexual Offense Resource Guide endorsed such warnings in learning materials that might relate to sexual assault. The panel recommended that faculty members “avoid unnecessary triggers” in the classroom and provide advisories for all materials that could cause trauma to survivors of sexual assault. But the college removed those recommendations from the guide after professors said it threatened academic freedom.
The American Association of University Professors agrees. “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual,” it said in a statement last year. “Some discomfort is inevitable in classrooms if the goal is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered, and, more generally, expand their horizons so as to become informed and responsible democratic citizens.”
Some colleges have decided to issue warnings themselves. The University of Kentucky this summer asked incoming students to read Picking Cotton (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), a memoir by a white woman and the black man she wrongly accused of rape in 1984. The man, Ronald Cotton, was exonerated after serving more than a decade in jail. In the book, the two write alternating chapters; some of hers describe details of the assault. The university placed a card in the front of each copy it sent to its 6,201 new students. “The book carries a trigger warning,” the card says. Students who are survivors of sexual assault “may elect to only read Ronald Cotton’s chapters of Picking Cotton (except pages 127 and 131) or contact the Office of New Student and Family Programs/Common Reading Experience.”
Andrew Hippisley, president of the University Senate at Kentucky, endorses the warning. “If you are doing a Russian-literature degree, indirectly you did choose Lolita, or if you chose an English degree, D.H. Lawrence,” says Mr. Hippisley, who directs the linguistics program. “But if you are applying to the University of Kentucky in engineering, and you’ve just had the worst sex-assault experience in your life, and the very first thing you get from Kentucky is, ‘Read this book,’ I do agree with the trigger warning, because you didn’t choose a major where that book could be expected reading.”
When students approach professors about classroom material that they find offensive or that could cause trauma, many faculty members are surprised. Some have never heard the term “trigger warning,” and most have been using the material in their courses for years, without reaction.
Philip N. Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park, was in the middle of a lecture on abortion last year in his course on contemporary family issues when a student got up and left. She later told him she wouldn’t be able to participate in class discussions concerning abortion.
“It surprised me because I was talking about statistics,” says Mr. Cohen, who tells students that 32 percent of pregnancies among unmarried couples end in abortion, compared with 6 percent among married couples. “We have to have that conversation in that class; it would be malpractice not to.”
He told the student she could leave the classroom when she needed to. He has also added a warning to the syllabus this year. “The content of this course will include topics that are difficult for some people to confront or discuss,” it says. “If there is a topic you are unable to discuss, please notify the professor so we can make alternative arrangements for your work.”
Mr. Cohen won’t stop teaching material that students might find upsetting, nor will he continue to issue trigger warnings throughout the semester. “We can’t function if we have to warn everybody about every traumatic topic,” he says. “But there are reasonable accommodations we should make.”
Sorting out how to make those accommodations, though, can be tricky. A few years ago, Elizabeth Isemann, who teaches political science at Southeast Community College, began getting requests from veterans who had secured educational accommodations from the college under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ms. Isemann says they presented the requests in her class on comparative politics, asking her to “be sensitive to images of war and violence in lecture content.” But those are common topics in her course: Ms. Isemann, who has taught at the Nebraska college for 15 years, shows video clips with war scenes from Germany, Russia, China, and Japan.
She warns students about each of those videos, so they can stay away or leave class on those days. “As soon as I start showing images from World War II, they will leave,” she says. “In one case I had a young man who didn’t stay for any of the video clips [on war], but he researched written content on the same subject and wrote a paper.”
More difficult, she says, is managing classroom discussion. “I have to work to navigate conversations away from subjects that might be uncomfortable,” she says. “Last spring there were students uncomfortable about the growth of ISIS. We have students talking about the fall of Fallujah. Some students were soldiers who had served there, and I know they were getting reasonably upset, so I try as artfully as possible to move the discussion away from what is happening now and back to the lecture content.”
Some professors remove controversial or sensitive course content altogether, before students even ask for warnings. Those faculty members say it simply isn’t worth the risk of alienating students.
Until last year, Neil Gilbert’s master’s-level course on social-welfare policy at the University of California at Berkeley included a lecture on abortion. During that lecture, Mr. Gilbert — who holds a chair in social welfare and has been at Berkeley for 45 years — has pushed students who are both in favor of a woman’s right to an abortion and opposed to the death penalty to think about possible inconsistencies in their positions.
“Maybe 15 to 20 students in a class of 100 are very offended,” he says. Some of them have said so on teaching evaluations, which administrators use in reviewing professors’ performance each year. Lately, though, Mr. Gilbert says, “sensitivity has become a more important criterion than intellectual challenge” when it comes to the way administrators review a professor’s performance. “If a number of students say you’re insensitive,” he says, “the administration dings you.”
So last year he dropped the lecture on abortion. Now he may eliminate a lecture on child sexual-abuse prevention, too. “It is not unlikely a few of the students in the class were sexually abused as children,” he says, “and I get seen as insensitive.”
Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman at Berkeley says it’s possible for professors to discuss sensitive topics while avoiding giving students offense. “Academic freedom is a valued principle at UC Berkeley, and it is compatible with providing a constructive and respectful classroom environment in which sensitive topics can be explored and debated,” she said in a statement to The Chronicle.
She also said faculty members were involved in reviewing their peers’ performance: “A committee of the faculty’s Academic Senate here regularly assesses the records of faculty in all areas, including teaching, and its written assessments are provided to the professor.”
Clash With Morality
At Duke University, Brian Grasso said this summer on a Facebook page for fellow members of the Class of 2019 that he wouldn’t read Fun Home, the recommended summer book. The memoir contained drawings and references to sex that clashed with his Christian morals, he said. Some classmates encouraged him to read it, but others agreed with him.
In an article for The Washington Post, Mr. Grasso wrote: “I assume that having to view graphic images of sex for a class will be rare. … If it does happen, … I believe professors should warn me about such material, not because I might consider them offensive or discomforting, but because I consider it immoral.” He declined to be interviewed by The Chronicle.
Stephen Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education at Duke, says that if it is difficult to know what might trigger students’ memories of trauma, it is perhaps even harder to know what students might consider immoral.
“We are not going to set policy at Duke about trigger warnings, any more than about course content in other dimensions,” he says. “But to me it’s a matter of common sense. I can imagine a faculty member teaching a course where common sense would lead a faculty member in a course description to give, not a trigger warning, but state something about the content that students could use their common sense to decide what they want to do.”
That puts decisions in the hands of faculty members, and at Duke, as elsewhere, they are still feeling their way. In a class on computer science last spring, a Duke professor, Owen L. Astrachan, mentioned that the subject of a movie he’d asked students to watch had committed suicide. After class a student came up and told him that he needed to use a trigger warning if he was going to mention suicide.
“My first reaction was: What, what, what?” says Mr. Astrachan. He had never heard of trigger warnings.
Upon reflection, he says, he realized that he didn’t have to announce that Aaron Swartz had killed himself. (The movie, The Internet’s Own Boy, notes the fact but focuses on the online activist’s life.) The way he died wasn’t as important for the class to know, the professor reasoned, as his work creating awareness and access to information on the Internet.
As a result of that experience, Mr. Astrachan plans to ask students this year to list their specific triggers in an anonymous questionnaire. He still isn’t sure what he’ll do with the information.
“I’m not going to track 92 students’ personal concerns,” he says. “But I am always attentive to my students. And I’ll internalize it — and it could change what I do, because I will have read it.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
