The Implicit and Explicit Rhetoric Underlying Trigger Warnings

It's been a while here at VM, but here we are trying to get back on the proverbial horse with a new post on trigger warnings. This topic blew up a couple of weeks ago with this New York Times article though apparently trigger warnings have a long and storied history that is rooted in second wave Feminism. Also, Slate declared 2013 the year of the trigger warning. I came late to trigger warnings though, as this New Yorker article suggests, they are of incredible import to me as a professor of higher education (note: I recently accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Northeast!) For as trigger warnings have secured advocates from across the internet, they have also secured supporters across colleges campuses.

This is a disclaimer, I am not sure what to think about trigger warnings. At times, they seem like liberalism (and all its saccrine and ineffective political correctness) taken too far. As some convincing articles from New Republic and Inside Higher Ed have suggested, trigger warnings limit intellectual freedom and deeply harm the humanities, which are already hurting. There is also the question of whether or not trigger warnings even do what they purport to do; that is, protect people from reliving or experiencing traumatic events. Though there are more anti-trigger warning arguments, I am predominately concerned with these two things: the effects of trigger warnings on the academic/intellectual work that the humanities conducts and the effectiveness of trigger warnings in preventing further emotional trauma to someone suffering from PTSD or another memory-related psychological issue.

But then I read articles like this one from the LA Times and I think that the anti-trigger reaction seems to be one borne out of neo-conservative and anti-feminist movements. Calling trigger warnings "madness" is far too close to hysteria, which was so frequently invoked to describe women of a strong/independent nature, pre-1960s. Trigger warnings could lead to a witch hunt in which educators are profoundly limited in what they teach;  they may be less about "helping" or "protecting" people suffering from traumatic experiences and more about curtailing the teaching of difficult or complicated material such as novels about rape and incest (thinking about Toni Morrison here as just one example of an author that younger students tend to find inaccessible and frustrating because of the difficult content that she confronts in her novels), yet I doubt that it is either all or nothing proposition, in this circumstance.

From what I gather from the trigger warning statements produced by students at Oberlin and UCSB and a student-led petition from Wellesley College, students are profoundly worried about each other: perhaps because they don't trust their professors and administrators to handle their emotions and experiences with care and respect. That the specter of sexual abuse and harassment haunts the language of these proposals is a major aspect of trigger warnings that the national news media--except those publications written for and by academics such as Inside Higher Ed-- is not necessarily picking up on. Because of the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, and the notorious inability of college administrations to fairly deal with these crimes, these statements seem to be stepping in to fill the gap that decisive and pro-survivor decisions by college and university administrations would more adequately fill. To put this bluntly, there is deep outrage across the country that higher education is not handling sexual assault ethically and trigger warnings are one (well-intentioned but not necessarily effective) way to take "a stronger stance . . . against issues of sexual harassment and violence" (language is taken directly from the UCSB student senate resolution).

Rebecca Mead's article, linked above, from the New Yorker, is perhaps the most compassionate of the news articles I have read on the subject of trigger warnings. Mead points to the Isle Vista/UCSB shootings and the millions of tweets with the #Yesallwomen hashtag as evidence that trigger warnings might be unfairly stigmatized when such issues of misogyny and racism metastasize into wide-spread and gruesome acts of violence. As almost every Jewish character in The Yiddish Policemen's Union utters at some point, it is strange times to be a... here I will replace Jew with woman. Men's rights advocates, slut shaming, rape apology, mass shootings etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. (on and on and on and on) suggest that the world, while perhaps safer overall than hundreds or thousands of years ago, (thanks Steven Pinker...), is still not all that safe--especially for women. In it not surprise, then, that students across the country--and at historically liberal and activist institutions--are looking for solutions to a problem with too many prongs.

While the scholar in me wants to pan the idea that trigger warnings may be effective in curtailing the re-membering of traumatic experiences, because I am frightened by the possibility of censorship and the further dismantling of the humanities within higher education, the educator in me wants to think about this debate as a teaching moment: a moment where discussions of trigger warnings and their potential positive and negative outcomes can be shared side-by-side with discussions about:

• the adjunctification of higher education
• the potential to teach within contact zones
• the ramifications of focusing on educators and classroom content when administrators ought to be held [more] accountable for their official policies and responses to sexual/violence and discrimination on college campuses.