Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

trying to make sure as few people as possible are prevented from enjoying the benefits of a university education through the institution's failure to adequately adapt to their needs

see, here's my issue with this debate. PTSD isn't like being in a wheelchair where you need ramps to go places. it's a treatable condition. a person doesn't need trigger warnings and special treatment to get the benefit of a good education. i figured out how to cope and got my English degree. did the same thing with law school. ended up making a decent place for myself in the world, and it's just gettin started, etc.

talking about needing a policy makes it seem like it's necessary when it's really not at all and totally mischaracterizes the issue which only further stigmatizes it. which makes me think that the people pushing this agenda don't understand what the hell they're talking about. they may understand the concept of ableism, but not trauma.

Applying them one-size-fits-all is taking the ethos of student affairs (where I work btw) and applying it to academics. It's a consequence of how universities have changed in the last 50 years to accommodating the needs of students. Every day I see the schism between colleagues whose background is education or administration and faculty with whom they barely interact, therefore they tend to regard students, implicitly, as clients.

applying them = applying the

is there anything inherent in trigger warnings that leads to censorship? if not, isn't it just a version the sticker on a dvd box?

― james lipton and his francs (darraghmac), Monday, May 19, 2014 1:51 PM (1 hour ago)

yes. unequivocally yes. trigger warnings do not alert us to potentially unpleasant content, content we might wish to avoid for reasons of taste. they alert us to potentially damaging content, content that might actually hurt us. mordy noted this upthread. the idea of "triggering" is tied to the idea of legitimate harm and threat, that people with PTSD need to be actively protected from the things that trigger them, that they in fact have a trumping right to be protected from such things. while no one's talking about truly censoring anything at the moment, this view of triggering gives the triggered enormous discourse-limiting power. it's not government censorship, no, but it can certainly have a chilling effect.

if the material is available to all those who choose to view in then I don't agree with you there.

"being triggered" doesn't damage anyone or anything, only a person can choose to do damage to themselves in regards to how they respond to unpleasant emotions. the worst part of trauma is our concept of what it means as opposed to what it actually did to us. there's totally a way out of it but it takes hard work and serious problem solving skills. that's what these people should be working on, not figuring out what color sticker they should put on a textbook.

i think contendo's got a good point, especially at the college stage where so many crucial intellectual judgments are being formed/re-formed. there are quite a few things i carried mistaken impressions of on past my college years just because they prevented me from ever really finding out in detail what they were all about. surely a rep for being emotionally harmful would have that kind of effect too.

idk there's gonna be a sizeable cohort setting out to collect the lot like it was pokemon iircc

i have to admit im a little surprised (gratified?) people put such stock into, like, "The Awakening" or "The Merchant of Venice" still having some affective power over 19 year olds.

in my experience getting kids to have literally any reaction to "literature" at all is quite a feat.

philosophical question, is 'derp' a reaction or not

counter argument to myself, maybe i'm an outlier, i taught myself how to read, taught myself humanistic ethics and morals via christianity when i was 7 to inoculate myself from some pretty nasty surroundings and actually practiced that shit throughout childhood, blah blah blah. everyone's got a different brain thing going on, i guess i'm not the only voice on this issue. but i still think it's a misguided and potentially harmful idea.

there's a push pull with literature as an elective slash some english as a mandatory slash the ideals of a liberal arts education transforming. i think this was covered upthread already, but.

like there's a notion that it is _important_ for students to experience other perspectives, and to be discomfited, and work through, so to speak, some heavy shit, so that they are inducted into a genuine adulthood with a wider field of vision. and this is supposed to make students uncomfortable, and challenge them, and confront them.

and then there is also the service university which is an expensive summer camp with a nice certificate at the end.

and this stuff is somewhere in between, because precisely it impacts what the "canon" is and what the mandatory lit curriculum shapes up like.

even in high school and jr. high like _tons_ of what we read were all coming of age war novels of some kind (which is actually really weird, and speaks to a great deal about when and why the curriculum was set!).

then you get to college and you're supposed to read all this stuff with emotions and settings and feelings and craft and just dive headlong into the sea of common experience of people of a certain class and social position and aesthetic sensibility and refinement and then you can learn to like things and develop taste (oh god) and you're told this is what grown people read. so if you opt out, what does that say about you? its a violent act. it believes in the power of the word more than the curriculum does, that's for sure!

that's the problem. they're teaching you this because it is supposed to be important. but simultaneously it's not important, it is claimed, in the sense that it can _matter_. and if it _is_ important, and _can_ matter, then you are allowed to say no to it.

its this false debate playacting as though humanities education actually resembles the captain my captain romanticism it occasionally aspires to.

(but that would be even worse, wouldn't it?)

the captain my captain romanticism

I don't get this phrase; as in the spirit of Whitman?

The spirit of Robin Williams, is how I took that.

Great posts Spectrum. The timing of this suggests it has a lot more to do with the current wave of social justice activism than it does with PTSD.

What I find strange is the echoes of the PMRC arguments 25 years ago. I remember most of the left being furious about the stickers and not buying the line that it was just informing people, not censorship, and they were right because the stickers led to records not being stocked in certain stores and the manufacture of clean versions, which are mild forms of censorship. At least the PMRC and MPAA are only concerned about under-18s. I'm uneasy with the idea that universities should be the first bodies to start labelling art for over-18s.

That's a crucial distinction, DL.

ive skimmed, has anybody waltzed in here to say tw: are basically viewer discretion is advised type shit and its rly not a big deal to do this?

ya

ok cool has anyone posted this yet> http://tressiemc.com/2014/03/05/the-trigger-warned-syllabus/

like there's a notion that it is _important_ for students to experience other perspectives, and to be discomfited, and work through, so to speak, some heavy shit, so that they are inducted into a genuine adulthood with a wider field of vision. and this is supposed to make students uncomfortable, and challenge them, and confront them.

But there's another notion endemic in most universities and colleges in the last 15 years that students enduring discomfiting pain must have services available, and professors are no less responsible than administrators for mitigating those painful experiences.

The explicit aim of the original Oberlin guidelines (which may have changed over time) was something along the lines of 'widening access to the classroom for past victims of sexual violence'. The idea that English Lit professors automatically know more about the harsh realities of life than all their students doesn't really stand up.

Also seems a little dishonest for the article linked above to equate this with a previous example of reactionary students complaining about having to think about issues of gender and oppression from a position of privilege.

Would it be nice & thoughtful to include trigger warnings on potentially troubling texts? Sure, of course. That part's easy.

The implications of this discussion, however, quickly get a good deal thornier. Do institutions (such as those of higher learning) have an obligation to provide such warnings on the material from which they teach? If so, what kind of obligation? What should be labeled and how? Whose decision is it? And is the likelihood that one might be triggered a disability? If so, what sort of accommodations should be required?

Taking the line of inquiry a bit further, do those who might be triggered have the authority to police discourse so as to protect themselves from triggers? If so, how so, and to what extent? And is it truly harmful to be triggered? If so, is it then assaultive to expose others to potentially triggering material without providing warnings or heeding their protestation? Etc...

There's an edge of hand-wringing hysteria to all that what-if-ing, but such questions must, I think, extend from a conception of PTSD as a medical condition with vulnerability to triggering its symptom. Especially in a moral climate that attaches special significance, in some cases legal significance, to our sense of having been wronged by the language and ideas of others (not faulting such attachment, btw).

^ goes back to bison an hour ago

There is no blanket obligation to provide warnings. There may be an obligation to engage with a student body that has requested that warnings be put on the agenda but the nature of that dialogue and the expectations it creates going to be different for every institution.

Leaving aside hyperbole about the marketisation of education (and if you're charging tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, idk if the students are the ones instigating that marketisation), there are legitimate questions over whether students should be ignored when they've requested input into classroom and behaviour.

I've not seen much that suggests there's an attempt to police discourse, rather than give an opportunity for students to remove themselves from the situation if they feel they need to without suffering any penalty and having a common-sense approach to whether the graphic materials that you are using in class are necessary.

The example that keeps coming up is a student who felt she wasn't able to leave a screening of a film with a traumatic rape scene because she thought it would draw attention but could have chose not to attend if she had known in advance. Is that hand-wringing?

Of course not. Absolutely nobody itt has called that particular clear-cut example hand-wringing or said that a warning shouldn't have been given.

I mean, no issue seems complicated if you only focus in the most cut-and-dried cases. That's easy.

it seems like everyone agrees that a TW would have been appropriate in the rape scene example. What's concerning to me is the wording of the Oberlin guildlines that objectionable material should be removed from the syllabus if it not of educational value--who is making that judgement, the instructor, the students or the administration? Also, looking again at the guidlines, the scope of what is considered harmful seems to be expanding to include not just traumatic scenes of sexual assault or violence, but a general feeling of racism, sexism, cis-ism that some people see in everything. I'm reminded here of some of the recent online social justice dust-ups in which people who have done something insensitive or offensive are told they have caused "harm"--which seems to take things out the realm of ideas and to treat unwanted ideas as assaults. (I'm also annoyed when libertarians claim that people are forcing them to do things at the point of a gun.)

The video example evidently wasn't clear-cut enough for the teacher to understand that they should have flagged it, in the absence of guidelines telling them that they needed to. That kind of thoughtlessness (or failure to understand that what may be an abstract idea for you isn't going to be for everyone) is why there's a case for things like this. Drawing the line might be challenging but the conversation about what is and isn't appropriate needs to happen.

Oberlin's guidelines are an extreme example and only exist in draft form at the moment.

Also seems a little dishonest for the article linked above to equate this with a previous example of reactionary students complaining about having to think about issues of gender and oppression from a position of privilege.

those complaints are similar to but have to be distinguished from those of their actually-triggered (here's where the criterion for what 'triggering' is has to be put into institutional practice!) counterparts. in that way this is in fact a test case for the trigger-ED project, since they can't exactly just deny students' experiences ('you're calling me a racist just because i'm white! that hurts me!'), especially from an evidently substantial moral/political position, but also don't want to be in the business of determining whose claims to oppression etc as a basis for trigger vulnerability excuse slips are legitimate.

wtf this bullet point from Oberlin:

Try to avoid using graphic language yourself within the trigger warning, but do give students a hint about what might be triggering about the material. If you say something like, “This movie might be upsetting to some of you,” that can a) sound patronizing and b) lead everyone who’s experienced trauma to feel like they might have a terrible time. Try instead saying, “This movie contains scenes of racism, including slurs and even physical violence, but I believe that the movie itself is working to expose and stand against racism and I think it is important to our work here.”

I believe The Birth of a Nation is working to expose and stand against racism and I think it is important to our work here.

'this thing might fuck yall up'

'this bitch really gets it bad in the next chapter, so… watch out'

'Birth of a Nation' is an explicitly racist movie that we are watching because adults can study things that they don't always agree with.

Try to avoid using graphic language yourself within the trigger warning, but do give students a hint about what might be triggering about the material. If you say something like, “This movie might be upsetting to some of you,” that can a) sound patronizing and b) lead everyone who’s experienced trauma to feel like they might have a terrible time. Try instead saying, “This movie contains scenes of racism, including slurs and even physical violence, but I believe that the movie itself is working to expose and stand against racism and I think it is important to our work here.”

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 20, 2014 4:22 PM (7 minutes ago)

this was written by a student, right

You may hesitate to issue a trigger warning, or try to compose a vague trigger warning, because you feel it might also be a “spoiler.” A trigger warning does not need to give everything away. If you’re warning people about the issue of suicide in Things Fall Apart, you can write, “Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide…” You don’t necessarily need to “give away” the plot. However, even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler.

the "always, always" really makes me feel like they gave this to a grad student to do

here's the whole thing

http://web.archive.org/web/20131222174936/http:/new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot

"educate yourself"!!! ok, i can't

always, like, waaaay worse

you there, in the purple shirt

it is always, always worse to misattribute a gender to someone than it is to call attention to their wardrobe

may i have your permission to direct your body using physical contact with my own?

clear trigger warnings are not reducible to "content warnings" otherwise there would be no controversy. "this is the same as saying 'there's some rough content here', right?" isn't cutting it, as much as it gets repeated. merely giving such a warning is not at issue (well, it is, among people with an investment in harshness...)

two aspects of trigger warnings are meeting skepticism and resistance or "reaction" in political terms: what is proposed to deserve a warning, and what a student is permitted to do once the warning is given.

first, trigger warnings, if put into practice, would institutionalize consideration of things like racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry on the same plane as individual experiences of violence or victimization (war, abuse, etc) that cause PTSD. post-trauma is the model. it insists that politics and psychology are indivisible. conservative and universalist-liberal objections tend to fall here

second, (and things are fuzzier here) students at risk of being triggered will have some kind of avenue or resources to complete the course in an alternate way. disability is the model here: dyslexia, and so on. if a text is so "warned" then pedagogy and the surrounding administration have to provide multiple options. academics, as a class, already have a self-conception as tough-minded and justice-aware people, but aren't exactly inviting of another administrative headache, to put it very generously...

it is always interesting to me that these kinds of controversies always spring up in English departments.

This response is going around.

But learning about these topics are all necessary forms of education. And trigger warnings won’t solve or ameliorate the problems that open, frank, guided discussion by well-trained, competent instructors can. Every semester, I gird up my loins to address the range of defensive and uncomfortable reactions that students have to material they have been taught never to discuss in polite company.

well, what if such an instructor isn't available?

go stand in the fuckin corner

Now go home and get your fuckin shine box

historians will write about how liberal humanism finally collapsed when it was no longer able to effectively distinguish between trigger warnings and spoiler warnings.