Important topic, thanks. The answer to you question is no. Students understand the nature of the course before they sign up.

Two thoughts:

1. The student is most certainly a CUSTOMER and the professor a SERVICE PROVIDER; this is a simple fact and has nothing to do with the profit-seeking status of the institution. But this relationship should not be misconstrued to mean that students shouldn't be thrust into an uncomfortable intellectual environment since that is often the perfect place for real learning. Rather, the customer-provider relationship should inform professors that their students are not subordinate to them; many professors need serious attitude adjustments in this regard. For example, any professor who condescends to students should be placed on monitored progressive discipline, with termination as the logical final step.

2. Schools should strive to achieve minimal censoring. Decorum is required, obviously, but the general rule should be to allow ideas to stand on their own, subject to debate and criticism whenever possible.

It's an interesting perspective, but I do not entirely agree. Taking a trigger warning as a label of uncomfortable content is an abuse of it. Trigger warnings are for survivors who lived though such circumstances who may want or need to avoid reliving it- not to keep naive majority people in their bubble.

It is unfortunate that the media that most needs a trigger warning is often not labeled as such because of the very position it takes that requires a trigger warning (rape apologists, MRAs, spiritual abuse, etc.), in contrast to sensitive critique or analysis.

Students starting at university must learn that they are - by default of matriculating - entering into a potentially "trigger warning" area.

Heck, young adults need to learn that living life means being in a potentially "trigger warning" area.

Failing to recognize this - and expecting clear "trigger warnings" against all potential harms - is infantalizing and also actually detrimental to people who have suffered serious mental trauma from a past event.

Should have also been concerned about spreading lies. The case against WA is not clear.

This is a very thought-provoking post. I talk quite a bit in offline conversations about the commodification of education and the student-customer problem, and I think the connection you make between the that model and the rationalizing away of the critical canon is something to be taken seriously. I may have more to say when I've had time to process this a little bit (it's packed with things to think about, and I appreciate that very much). In the meantime, I'll try and get some friends to take a look at it.

Grow up you wimps!

This is something I've pondered quite a bit as a university lecturer. I teach a (compulsory) module which has quite a bit of potentially triggery content in terms of sexual assault and violence. The way I've negotiated it is not by giving students trigger warnings as such, but by addressing the fact that there is senstive material at the start of the course and talking about the fact that more broadly, literature is meant to move us in ways that will not always be comfortable. I try to create a space where students will feel comfortable bringing up concerns with specific texts (and sometimes students have).

I do think as teachers we have a responsibility to give students enough information to make informed choices about the material they are going to be exposed to, but I also think it's important for intellectual spaces to allow discomfort in. There's a really big continuum between 'this makes me uncomfortable' and 'this triggers me' and while I would never want any student to experience the latter if I could avoid it, I actively do want them to experience the other end of the scale and to think about why.

I recently graduated college with a degree in sociology. While in college I had access to counseling which revealed that I had PTSD with attendant flashbacks and pretty debilitating periods of anxiety and/or depression. There certainly were films, discussions, and writing topics which would leave me incapacitated for days at a time, leading to absences and delayed assignments. I know there will be people who judge me for weakness for that, but I'm happy with what I have achieved and with the tremendous effort I have put into being an effective person.

But back to the point: I bring this up because encountering a trigger unprepared, or without the option to avoid or mitigate it without my grades suffering, is something I can only describe as a medical crisis--which on a neurological level, is exactly what it is. I certainly don't expect the world to cater to my limitations, and over time, I know it is possible to retrain myself to curb my trigger response. Even so, like most college-aged people, I was neither mature enough, knowledgeable enough about the ins and outs of my psychological condition, nor in an environment of sufficiently low stress to successfully manage my trigger response at that time. I really would have benefited very much from a systematic, in-class acknowledgement of and accommodations for the challenges some material would present for me. That does NOT mean I think all uncomfortable subjects should be avoided, nor that discussion of oppression should be softened or censored. But "trigger warnings" in themselves, used appropriately, would have made my college experience much less psychologically injurious.

The problem is the Social Sciences and the Humanities. If they were eliminated from the curriculum there would be much less chance of student upset. Of course, any mention of evolution or the Big Bang would have to be avoided in hard science courses. ;)

The "trigger warning" itself is hopelessly inadequate as an attempt to grapple with the lived experience of trauma, and the innumerable circumstances that cause it. It may be appropriate when the intensity of the content is at extreme odds with reasonable expectations of the context (for example, if graphic images of dismembered war victims appeared in the local newspaper's wedding announcements), but utterly out of place in any environment where participants are expected to be challenged to interact with reality as adults. The latter scenario should apply to every university course worth taking.

That said, trigger warnings do give readers a revealing glimpse into which demographic groups and life circumstances the user values and takes seriously - and a potentially damning inference about which ones they don't.

There can be no separation of opposition to trigger warnings in an academic setting and a wider acceptance of trigger warnings in some settings. "Trigger" warnings are inherently problematic, not just contextually problematic. The reason trigger warnings are disseminating into academia has everything to do with the wider context in which they have always been used, or more appropriately, always been abused. Of course various groups are going to co-opt trigger warnings for their own purposes - it's very saddening, but hardly surprising. That's what you get when you create a monster.

The US educational system should be very careful about "coddling" students to the extent that they don't really learn much, but are made to feel "good" about their educational experience. Real learning takes place when we are made uncomfortable and confused or encounter language which is not our usual. Human evolution happens through discomfort. Challenges are what build character and excellence.

I understand that we humans have traumas in our lives and that certain "trigger" words, events, or conversations will cause discomfort. We get beyond those traumas by facing the triggers.

Professors should be condescending to their students, yet not abusive. Simply because the student or someone else is paying doesn't mean that the professor should act like counter staff at Burger King and let you "have it your way"!

As a PTSD sufferer, my spouse gets angry at the re-purposing of trigger warnings as to include anything that could make someone uncomfortable. Colonialism, for instance - people actually traumatized by colonialism are, in all likelihood, too old to be in college today. The other side of his feelings comes from his own trauma. There are no warnings that could protect him from anxiety or panic attacks, as the abuse he suffered took place in an ordinary household environment.