Academic Content Warnings and Safe Spaces

In a stunning, disappointing level of what feels like sh*tposting by the dean of students and president of the University of Chicago ...

I don't even know. I realize that the institutionally supported safe spaces there still exist, and that teachers still give content warnings before really grizzly, gross, and traumatic stuff, because they care about their students and want to set them up to engage well with the material, rather than turn every book into a potential monster closet for traumatized students.

But I'm still really ashamed by the administration of my alma mater right now.

Care to elaborate or link to an article about what happened.

Tkyl wrote:

Care to elaborate or link to an article about what happened.

Saw this making the rounds on my Facebook profile:
UChicago's anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power.

Dean of students basically channeled the anti-PC crowd who doesn't understand what the hell Trigger Warnings are meant for... and seems to think it's perfectly ok to talk about freedom of expression while saying they will not allow students to protest speakers they disagree with... because that makes sense.

Demosthenes wrote:
Tkyl wrote:

Care to elaborate or link to an article about what happened.

Saw this making the rounds on my Facebook profile:
UChicago's anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power.

Dean of students basically channeled the anti-PC crowd who doesn't understand what the hell Trigger Warnings are meant for... and seems to think it's perfectly ok to talk about freedom of expression while saying they will not allow students to protest speakers they disagree with... because that makes sense.

Thanks for posting that link, Demosthenes. It was a good read.

Even though I use trigger warnings (or "content advisories") in my courses, I admit that I'm conflicted about them. I'm fully willing to admit that half of that is probably just leftover macho bullsh*t from my Marine Corps days (the say they don't brainwash you, but...), yet the worry still remains. Do they really work? Are they really harming anyone if I do or don't give them out? Does anyone even listen to me when I warn them? And am I even warning them about the right content?

Last semester, I assigned The Godfather to my seniors and I made a point of warning them about the blood and explosions, etc. They didn't even blink at the horse head scene ("What's the big deal?" they asked afterwards--they probably see worse on The Walking Dead), but the scene they found most disturbing was the graphic domestic violence scenes between Carlo and Connie. It didn't even occur to me to warn them about that.

Something similar happened two years ago when I showed a different class of seniors The Dark Knight. After the first half hour, I stopped the film to start our discussion and one poor girl had to run to the bathroom because she was sobbing uncontrollably; she had a terrible fear of clowns and the Joker set her off.

I felt awful. I would never have imagined someone could be so upset by that--I don't think I ever even considered the Joker to be a clown, really (at least not in the same sense as Pennywise or other traditionally creepy portrayals). I definitely warn all my students about it now, though. I don't ever want to inadvertently inflict that kind of sorrow on one of my students again.

The first half hour of Dark Knight has a 10 minute scene of nothing but 7 guys in clown masks. I can see that being greatly disturbing to someone with a fear of clowns.

While I think the trigger warnings might be a courteous thing to do, I don't believe that instructors should feel forced to use them, especially since there is no way to protect against every trauma and phobia any given student may have. After all, who would have thought to warn people about the inclusion of clowns? And there's any number of things in literature or film that could cause someone distress. Someone in a book might get bullied or teased because they are fat as an example. I don't think most people would have a real problem warning people that a book or film might include rape or some other form of gratuitous violence, but when it starts getting down to the level of individual phobias, that's really when people start to think the whole thing is getting ridiculous and begin pushing back.

Maybe a solution would be to ask students to stop after class or during office hours to notify instructors of any severe triggers such as clowns or spiders, and thus avoid attempts to include every possible random thing that someone might be upset over.

I still can't help but wonder if they are really all that necessary under most circumstances though. I don't think I've ever experienced a trigger warning in any class I've ever had from first grade all the way up through graduate school, so I had no idea until today that it was even a thing.

Unless you've had a full blown panic attack or a PTSD flashback you don't get to say trigger warnings are unnecessary.

Is it necessary to let people know whether the food they are about to consume contains peanuts?

Maq wrote:

Unless you've had a full blown panic attack or a PTSD flashback you don't get to say trigger warnings are unnecessary.

Is it necessary to let people know whether the food they are about to consume contains peanuts?

Sure, if you know they have an allergy to peanuts or you own a restaurant and have some sort of legal liability to inform people what's in their food. But if I bring something to a pot luck, then no, I don't label every ingredient that's in it just in case someone has an allergy to something. I've actually never seen anyone do that, and most people with food allergies will ask what is included if they are uncertain about something.

In the case of a college class, how are you going to reasonably warn against every trigger that someone may have considering that *everything* included in a book or movie could be a potential trigger to someone? That's putting too much burden on instructors to do things outside of the context of their job, which is to actually teach the material.

If an instructor assigns a book for a student to read or a film for a student to watch, is it not possible for the student who gets panic attacks or PTSD to ask if those particular triggers are included, or to research what the book or film is about online before reading/watching it? Why is this responsibility all on the instructor who may have hundreds of students and can't reasonably cater to every student's individual needs?

The trigger warning discussion always seems to jump straight to "if we can't do everything, why would we do anything?" with a healthy dose of "do I really need to check if people are afraid of corn or the color blue?"

I think food allergies at a potluck is a fantastic analogy. If I bring something with nuts, it's reasonable to mark it as such. Same with peanuts, seafood, and shellfish. Maybe meat, maybe gluten, maybe dairy. Probably not pepper, or eggs, or broccoli.

There are tiers of "expected-ness", in both allergies and trigger warnings. Peanuts are common and severe; domestic violence seems like a decent analogue. Having trigger warnings for domestic violence, graphic violence, and sexual violence seem like a decent bare minimum. Having trigger warnings for, say, clowns, or vicious animals, or plane crashes, seems analogous to gluten warnings: sometimes they make sense, depending on your audience, but might not be a "standard".

EDIT: If you don't mark common allergens on potluck dishes, you're lucky that you don't have to deal with any significant allergies in your life. You really should mark them.

People who are traumatized and have severe physiological reactions to the trauma, or who have actual panic attacks due to anxiety, are mentally ill, just like people who have bad knees and can't run a mile without messing them up for a month. I have no problem with people excepting themselves from situations for those kinds of reasons. This is not something that is under their control without medication or other treatment, and may still not be fully controlled. No biggie, talk to the professor before the course starts.

What worries me is people who have been habituated to simply fall apart under new or unfamiliar kinds of stress. This is the kind of thing that can be avoided through exposure and learned reactions, just as most 2 year-olds will freak out over a scraped, bloody knee, but five year-olds will completely ignore it. I'm worried that people who are not exposed to traumatic situations will learn not how to deal with their feelings, but to simply demand that they be allowed to avoid them. Trauma here can be exposure to new beliefs and different ways of behaving. A liberal might be disturbed to hear a racist joke for the first time in public; a conservative might find someone who is laughingly disdainful of religion to be deeply offensive. But that's not trauma in the psychological sense, that's simply encountering new situations and beliefs.

I see trigger warnings as very useful for the first group, and very harmful for the second. Unless we are raising a generation of actually damaged kids, in numbers unprecedented in the past, the second group outnumbers the first. Given that, I'd relegate avoidance behavior to those who can justify it, and have the larger group learn to deal with the new stressors just like they dealt with the old ones. I'd go with the same technique we used in the past; a quiet discussion with the professor or a TA about the situation, and a quiet accommodation.

So I'm really conflicted on the idea of a "one size fits all" approach. I've seen people who were raised in mental isolation (from home schooling, for example) really go through culture shock when they hit their college environment. But the ones that shut down and refuse to deal with the challenges to their worldview don't last long. They give in to the fear and discomfort and isolate themselves, and eventually fail out. I've also seen people from severely privileged environments with similar issues, not wanting to admit that there are other people with vibrant lives and interests out there competing with them. Some of them don't do well, either.

But most people, when faced with culture shock or new experiences, find a way to adapt and deal with them, especially in the safe space of a college campus. (Yes, colleges are pretty isolated and have their own social norms, and are usually quite safe for intellectual exploration even of uncomfortable topics, specialty schools perhaps excluded.) I hesitate to support a solution that lets them avoid images and topics that simply *disturb* them, on the grounds that a small subset of those people might actually have a panic attack or the like. It asks too little of students in challenging themselves.

I think U Chicago did itself a huge dis-service in refusing to do anything at all and giving the finger to concerns about appropriate speakers. And it is known as a bastion of conservative ideology, famous for it's Blue Water economics and the like.

But I'm even more worried about the idea that any student who feels uncomfortable can avoid a topic at will. In a sense, that devalues the problems that people like myself who *live* with anxiety and panic disorders experience in life. We not only have to learn to deal with our actual triggers and get on with life, but we have to deal with the low-level, background fears that ordinary people never experience. All the damn time. In a very real sense, I spent 40-odd years of my life with *everything* as a trigger. My adrenaline was permanently on. I *had* to deal with exposures because to do otherwise would be to retreat from life (and still not get relief from the fear and anxiety). I had no safe space, and no protection from triggers outside my own ability to deal with them.

Someone who doesn't have a strong physiological reaction to a psychological stimulus probably doesn't need to be exempted from that stimulus, to my way of thinking. They (unlike me) can quickly and effectively learn to moderate the reaction they do have, and in the process become stronger and more resilient in their life. Unless, of course, we teach them that it's okay to flee from situations that are merely uncomfortable. Then they won't have to learn how to deal with new things, and when they get out into the real world, they will find themselves under pressures that they have no idea how to handle. (And lest you think this is all about coddling wide-eyed liberals, trigger warnings are also useful in situations where conservative students can feel overwhelmed at all the world is throwing at them, in language and beliefs and images, as I mentioned above. Don't read more politics into this than necessary. I'm willing to bet that "trigger warnings", if they existed at a school like Oral Roberts would include things like sexual imagery in poems and songs and books, frank discussion of evolution and the use of invective in everyday speech, as represented in media.)

So my stance, from the experiences of having *lived* with clinical anxiety and panic attacks and related issues my whole damn life is that people who are simply *uncomfortable* with stimuli need to learn to deal with that discomfort, work out their accommodations with it, and move on. That's part of what childhood and college are all about, after all.

For people who have been in combat, or suffered domestic abuse, or have panic/anxiety disorders, sure, work something out with the professor. Concerns should be obvious from the course content listings. But frankly, for less serious reactions, I think perhaps the best course is to say "Yep, this course will include graphic images of Nazi violence and anti-Semitism and personal atrocities; it's about WWII. Expect it, deal with it or move on."

Any step of actually censoring course content simply to spare feelings should be considered with extreme unease, whether the request is based on liberal or conservative or libertarian concerns.

Hey, University of Chicago: I am an academic. I am a survivor. I use trigger warnings in my classes. Here’s why.

It is impossible for a professor or teacher to anticipate every student’s triggers, and frankly, I’ve never met a student who was demanding or entitled about having their specific triggers tagged in advance. What I have encountered, numerous times, are students who have a trauma history or a mental illness that involves triggers, who are only willing to gently and quietly request trigger warnings after I have made my pro-TW stance abundantly clear. These requests have always been polite and reasonable, and have never involved scrubbing my syllabus clean of challenging material.
Because I am a rape survivor with trauma triggers, I know firsthand that the experience of using trigger warnings completely contradicts the anti-TW stereotype. I am not a soft-willed, petulant baby. I am a battle-tested, iron-willed survivor who has faced far more personal horror than any anti-TW demagogue could. I do not use TW’s to “protect myself” from writing that challenges me intellectually. I read writing by people I disagree with on a daily basis, for both academic and personal enrichment; my use of trigger warnings to sometimes avoid rape- and stalking-related content is utterly irrelevant to that. And the use of trigger warnings does not make me weak. Trigger warnings empower me by allowing me to customize my reading-about-rape experience. I get to choose when and how I present myself with upsetting or triggering content. This makes it easier for me to do so regularly. And for the record, when I am faced with triggering material, I am not a trembling, weeping wreck, f*ck you very much.
Erika Price wrote:

It is impossible for a professor or teacher to anticipate every student’s triggers, and frankly, I’ve never met a student who was demanding or entitled about having their specific triggers tagged in advance. What I have encountered, numerous times, are students who have a trauma history or a mental illness that involves triggers, who are only willing to gently and quietly request trigger warnings after I have made my pro-TW stance abundantly clear. These requests have always been polite and reasonable, and have never involved scrubbing my syllabus clean of challenging material.

I think this is an ideal approach.

Robear wrote:
Erika Price wrote:

It is impossible for a professor or teacher to anticipate every student’s triggers, and frankly, I’ve never met a student who was demanding or entitled about having their specific triggers tagged in advance. What I have encountered, numerous times, are students who have a trauma history or a mental illness that involves triggers, who are only willing to gently and quietly request trigger warnings after I have made my pro-TW stance abundantly clear. These requests have always been polite and reasonable, and have never involved scrubbing my syllabus clean of challenging material.

I think this is an ideal approach.

Agreed, and what I was also trying to get at in my own convoluted thoughts.

Robear wrote:

So my stance, from the experiences of having *lived* with clinical anxiety and panic attacks and related issues my whole damn life is that people who are simply *uncomfortable* with stimuli need to learn to deal with that discomfort, work out their accommodations with it, and move on. That's part of what childhood and college are all about, after all.

My question is how many of the latter actually exist, cos I'd expect if they do exist they're on their way to the Wizard to get a new brain.

I'd lay real money that the number of people who need trigger warnings and don't request them far outweigh the number of people who don't and do.

Maq wrote:
Robear wrote:

So my stance, from the experiences of having *lived* with clinical anxiety and panic attacks and related issues my whole damn life is that people who are simply *uncomfortable* with stimuli need to learn to deal with that discomfort, work out their accommodations with it, and move on. That's part of what childhood and college are all about, after all.

My question is how many of the latter actually exist, cos I'd expect if they do exist they're on their way to the Wizard to get a new brain.

I'd lay real money that the number of people who need trigger warnings and don't request them far outweigh the number of people who don't and do.

If all of these people have such severe medical needs, then why aren't they notifying their instructors, or asking a doctor to do it, or filing some sort of special assistance request with the school? Most if not all schools do have procedures for students with special needs to receive help.

Again, why is all the responsibility on everyone *other* than the actual person having the problem? If a student isn't willing to at least make *some* effort, then maybe the problem isn't as severe for them as they are making it out to be and they would thus fall under that category of just being uncomfortable.

bekkilyn wrote:

If all of these people have such severe medical needs, then why aren't they notifying their instructors, or asking a doctor to do it, or filing some sort of special assistance request with the school? Most if not all schools do have procedures for students with special needs to receive help.

because they're afraid? ashamed/embarrassed? because they don't want to risk 'outing' themselves publicly?, because people keep telling them their problems aren't real and to stop being "special snowflakes"?

* I don't want to see any casually transphobic stuff show up in any classes (it has before - e.g: a photo of Caitlyn Jenner showing up in a photography class lecture as a "light hearted aside" or poorly considered comments from other students) but there isn't an way easy for me and my social anxiety to convincingly protest it's showing up without risking outing myself to *someone* before I was ready to do so.

Maq wrote:

Robear wrote:
So my stance, from the experiences of having *lived* with clinical anxiety and panic attacks and related issues my whole damn life is that people who are simply *uncomfortable* with stimuli need to learn to deal with that discomfort, work out their accommodations with it, and move on. That's part of what childhood and college are all about, after all.
---
My question is how many of the latter actually exist, cos I'd expect if they do exist they're on their way to the Wizard to get a new brain.

I'd lay real money that the number of people who need trigger warnings and don't request them far outweigh the number of people who don't and do.

I'd go the other way. Anxiety disorder is estimated by NIMH to affect about 30% of the US population. However, many of those will not actually have issues that would be handled by a trigger warning policy that results in changed content for a class. And yet polls of students in the last two years are showing a majority of respondents in favor of trigger warnings, and around 30% even feel that disturbing speech is not protected by the first amendment. If that's accurate, then it's possible colleges will end up establishing blanket trigger warning policies when in fact individual accommodations would be more appropriate. (It's hard to get good data, though.)

This is one area where I line up with libertarians and anti-PC types. But please note; I'm arguing we're best served by individual accommodations, rather than actual control of course content and speech limitations, and especially not by the UChicago method of just saying "Suck it up, losers".

It's shocking, but 18-22 year olds can apparently sometimes over-react to otherwise good and reasonable ideas.

pyxistyx wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

If all of these people have such severe medical needs, then why aren't they notifying their instructors, or asking a doctor to do it, or filing some sort of special assistance request with the school? Most if not all schools do have procedures for students with special needs to receive help.

because they're afraid? ashamed/embarrassed? because they don't want to risk 'outing' themselves publicly?, because people keep telling them their problems aren't real and to stop being "special snowflakes"?

I wasn't suggesting they need to stand up in front of the entire class and announce everything publicly, but they can talk personally to their instructors or send them email if they don't want to do it face to face. Yes, they might be afraid or embarrassed due to past experiences, but their instructors aren't mind readers and aren't going to just "know" that someone in their class has a debilitating phobia of bananas that would send that student into a major panic attack in the middle of class should it be a topic of discussion. Someone needs to let the instructors know and that responsibility typically would fall on the student in a college situation. We're not discussing young children here, but people who are supposed to be independent adults.

I accept that their problems are very real (and have personally experienced some things myself due to having my own anxiety issues) and yet I also expect that if these students are capable of attending a university and living independent lives, they are functional enough to be able to take some reasonable responsibility for their own health care.

University instructors are not the enemy. Most are usually very agreeable to working with students who care enough to ask for help or let them know if they are having a problem.

pyxistyx wrote:

* I don't want to see any casually transphobic stuff show up in any classes (it has before - e.g: a photo of Caitlyn Jenner showing up in a photography class lecture as a "light hearted aside" or poorly considered comments from other students) but there isn't an way easy for me and my social anxiety to convincingly protest it's showing up without risking outing myself to *someone* before I was ready to do so.

I don't want to see that stuff either, but that falls more under the category of discrimination in the same way as an instructor getting up in front the class and telling racist jokes. Other than those schools that are super-conservative, the school probably even has an anti-discrimination policy for gender orientation and an instructor participating in transphobic behavior would be violating a policy that's already in place. One wouldn't need to be trans to report it, so no "outing" would be required in such a circumstance.

So the Internet and somewhat-popular blogs have pretty much made the terms "trigger" and "safe space" mean dumb things due to nothing but their own repetition, and now they get to also make fun of people who want to take the actual issue seriously. Neat.

We have a rating system for films and video games that give reasons for it and basically warnings, such as sexual content or violence ect. If you go on the BBFC it will even break those down even further to find out if the film is for you. I don't see the problem with people extending that to books on their course. Which is basically what trigger warnings are. We had one on a recent podcast about college sports because we talked about rape culture within college sport, that is because listening to a show that normally covers sporting events, doesn't normally go into such terrority so seems wise to give folk a heads up.

Now if you go into a course about a given subject where it is clear that certain things are going to come up then complain that there were no trigger warnings, then I think you're just making a mountain out of a mole hill. For example I did a module on Representing the Holocaust at undergrad level, the name is warning enough, you don't need thr lecturer to say "some things we cover (well all) maybe upsetting" because it's about the Holocaust, it's clear in the name.

As someone who's experienced negative side effects of rape and domestic abuse, I appreciate trigger warnings because it gives me the time to prepare for dealing with the content. Just a head's up, brace yourself and carry on makes a world of difference.

It's insensitive, in the least, to ridicule me for wanting this. If there are people out there who are abusing a tw system to insulate themselves against unpleasantness, that is a different beast that I shouldn't be punished for.

Where did the ridiculing bit come from?

Personally, I think trigger warnings are a troubling issue for some people because they're a touchstone for larger issues we're still coming to terms with as a society.

In education, as in all things, I try to follow Wheaton's Law, so I include warnings, or "content advisories," for my students, but I can also see where those UChicago admin folks are coming from (however misguided & tone-deaf it may be).

Even though I can say with absolute certainty that my high school students these days are much smarter and much more empathetic than I was when I was their age, I also notice that they have much more trouble coping with stressors that us older folks simply take for granted. The strangest of these is the troubling modern phenomena of teenagers taking their parents along with them to job interviews, but that's only the most egregious example in my eyes.

What I believe the UChicago is responding to is a feeling amongst educators that we need to "toughen up" our students for the real world, which is silly when you take a step back to think about it, but exists nonetheless. I don't attribute any malice to the heads of UChicago or to any other educator that has qualms about trigger warnings. People don't become teachers because we want to inflict pain on students, but we sometimes fear that we're doing them a disservice by not allowing them to grapple with these ideas in what we (as educators) deem a safe space: our classrooms.

As an English teacher, this reminds me most of the controversy surrounding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that surfaces every few years. Do we say "the word" when we teach it? Do we get the edited versions of the text that have removed that word? There's a great 60 Minutes segment on this issue, but it's something that teachers and prof.'s really do wrestle with all the time. (For the record, I don't say it aloud--and I skip over it when I read the text aloud--but I also try not to shy away from the troubling issues it raises in class. It's a fine line and one that's easy to screw up.)

Even if we make the wrong choice by leaning toward the "toughening up" approach, try to remember that deep down we think we're doing it for the good of our students.

It was the subject of the article Demosthenes linked.

Amoebic wrote:

As someone who's experienced negative side effects of rape and domestic abuse, I appreciate trigger warnings because it gives me the time to prepare for dealing with the content. Just a head's up, brace yourself and carry on makes a world of difference.

It's insensitive, in the least, to ridicule me for wanting this. If there are people out there who are abusing a tw system to insulate themselves against unpleasantness, that is a different beast that I shouldn't be punished for.

This. So much this. The point is not to have your world wrapped in cotton wool so you don't have to experience things that make you feel uncomfortable, it's so that people take the time to bell the metaphorical cat so it doesn't take you by surprise.

Contrary to how this seems to be being portrayed, people with mental illnesses and trauma spend their entire fricking lives low-level dealing with this crap and are pretty used to it. It's the stuff that hits you unexpectedly that causes the real damage. A trigger warning can be nothing more than 4 words to avoid putting someone through hell again. It's not much to ask.

Oh, and since it was asked before, yes I always ask if someone has any food allergies or intolerances before I cook for them the first time. Or if it's a gift of, say, cookies I list the ingredients on a little tag. Of course I do.

I suspect part of the problem here might be people using the word "triggered" a bit free and loose in the same way people use "panic attack" to mean "I feel a bit uncomfortable and would like a cup of tea. That's not something I've seen but it appears to be A Thing in the states.

FWIW I'd happily drown in a puddle anyone who uses the term that way but hey - I don't like people using my life-threatening illness as a throwaway.

double post

Thanks Amoebic, I was not sure.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

EDIT: If you don't mark common allergens on potluck dishes, you're lucky that you don't have to deal with any significant allergies in your life. You really should mark them.

Better: If you're bringing food to a potluck (or to any occasion where a group of people whose food restrictions you don't already know will be eating), label it with a complete ingredient list or have a complete ingredient list available. Because while you might think that something doesn't contain gluten, that doesn't mean that you're right—whereas for example people with celiac disease know which ingredients commonly contain gluten even if most people might not expect it. (Like soy sauce.)

Hypatian wrote:
Chumpy_McChump wrote:

EDIT: If you don't mark common allergens on potluck dishes, you're lucky that you don't have to deal with any significant allergies in your life. You really should mark them.

Better: If you're bringing food to a potluck, label it with a complete ingredient list. Because while you might think that something doesn't contain gluten, that doesn't mean that you're right—whereas for example people with celiac disease know which ingredients commonly contain gluten even if most people might not expect it. (Like soy sauce.)

Agreed, but it feels like one of those things where people will do something if it doesn't feel too onerous, but will balk if it exceeds an arbitrary threshold. I would bet you could convince substantially more people to mark common allergens than provide complete ingredient lists.

At the very least, for allergies, I'd suggest the Major 8. Someone mentioned not labeling if it had eggs, but that is one of the 8 most common:

Milk.
Eggs.
Fish (e.g., bass, flounder, cod)
Crustacean shellfish (e.g. crab, lobster, shrimp)
Tree nuts (e.g., almonds, walnuts, pecans)
Peanuts.
Wheat.
Soybeans.