Why Am I Not Surprised?
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us...=fb-share&_r=1

We're guilty of this as well, with our language "content warnings".

Michael,
I have seen this issue from both sides, as a student and as a teacher. As a college student, I was annoyed when, during a slide lecture on baboon behavior, the male professor slipped in a slide of female grad students sunbathing in bikinis. He was used to having a largely male audience and was probably surprised when the female students in the auditorium hissed him. I think he had it coming.

On the other hand, as a professor I am not always sure what will offend students, and I have had my own unpleasant surprises (though none involving hissing). If there is going to be nudity in a film I am showing to the class, I usually tell them in advance. If someone has a real problem with the subject matter of some literature, I have occasionally made that work optional (e.g., Lord Rochester's poetry in a survey of British literature) or provided an alternate assignment. If I know that some students are likely to be outraged by something, but I still think it is important that they consider the issues of it (e.g., The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Huckleberry Finn), I try to put the work in a context that frames it as an issue to be debated, before they read the work in question.

My goal is not to dismiss the students' reactions, but to show them that there is more than one way to look at the issue. Censorship is the thing to be avoided (though even there, there are some lines that I probably wouldn't cross, and everyone is going to draw the line in a different place). Advance warning about some topics or images at least gives students a chance to alert the professor to minefields of which he or she may be unaware. Can students use these issues to try to get professors into trouble? Of course, and we are seeing more of that these days. I try to think in terms of reasonable accommodations that show respect for students' feelings while still addressing the edgier subjects.

Susan

I'm not sure "guilty" is the word I'd use. Perhaps "respectful" would be a better term?

Best,

Bill

Bill, if the New Yorker, or almost any decent literary magazine I can think of, respects it's readers enough to believe that they can handle whatever adult language may sometimes pop up without being warned; and we pride ourselves on being the best and most advanced workshop on the net, I don't think "respect" is the right word for our dirty word warnings.

Language warnings here strike me as prissy gestures of propitiation, concessions to the tyranny of the easily offended. The “trigger warnings” issue, as Susan illustrates, is a bit more complex.

As a general rule, I’m all in favor of history and literature courses that push students out of their comfort zones. Students should be disturbed by the pervasive atrocities of human history -- war, torture, rape, genocide, oppression of every variety. The fact that history can be so horrifying is a reason for exposing students to it, not a justification for shielding them from it. The promiscuous use of a racist epithet in Huckleberry Finn is offensive to you? Good! There would be something wrong with you if you weren’t offended. But the book is about a white boy learning to transcend and reject the racism he’s grown up with, and nothing embodies that racism more perfectly than the word in question. It would have been profoundly dishonest of Twain not to have peppered his novel with that toxic word. And if you’re smart enough to be in college, you’re smart enough to get that depicting racism accurately is a far cry from endorsing racism.

It’s important to be aware that there are students whose life experiences have made them all too familiar with the worst that human beings can inflict on each other. Professors are doing a good thing when they take the special vulnerabilities of those students into account. But codified “trigger warning” rules are certain to be booby-trapped with unintended consequences. Right-wing trolls know how to turn campus hate-speech codes against black students who say “redneck” or “cracker,” and there’s nothing to prevent comparable abuses by students wailing that some professor triggered their anxieties with, say, explicit gay material or radical feminist rhetoric in a course on modern liberation movements.

It's going to be a bit difficult to read 'Othello', I'm thinking. I played Iago about fifty years ago and he's really not a nice man.

I have no problem with what Susan chooses to do as a teacher, but I would have a problem if that approach were forced upon her by some sort of code. The question isn't whether it's ever appropriate for a teacher to prepare students for what they are about to read by "warning" them about it, but whether it's appropriate to legislate a teacher's lesson plans and academic freedom.

As M. A. Griffiths noted, the surest way to get someone to read your poem is to hang a warning on it. Heh.

Seriously, though, a little common sense and respect go a long way.

Yes, respect includes sensitivity when presenting material that has obvious potential to cause distress; however, respect also includes treating adults like adults, and expecting them to be able to handle adult topics and language...like, um, adults.

Balancing these two types of respect is where the common sense comes in. Or should.

That said, it is rarely, if ever, possible to legislate common sense into people who lack it. Would that it were.

[Cross-posted with Roger. Amen, brother.]

[By the way, my jeremiad of a few days ago, to the effect that wind chimes should be illegal, was hyperbole. I did not really mean to endorse the all-too-fashionable idea that there is a legislative solution to every societal problem. Sometimes one has to actually go to the bother of having a conversation with those of a different opinion; explaining one's position in a reasonable, respectful, and (one hopes) persuasive manner; and asking if a mutually acceptable solution can be worked out together.]

When I was teaching undergraduates, they seemed far ahead of me on sex, drugs, tattoos, weird corners of the Internet and many other subjects. They probably should have warned me that I didn't understand my own assigned material.

I think there are times when it is appropriate for me to tell students in advance that some of my course materials may be disturbing or offensive. (They often appreciate being warned, and I don't care as long as they end up reading and thinking about the course material. Hope springs eternal.) I don't think it's ever appropriate for the university to require me to issue such warnings--and then punish me if I fail to warn to their satisfaction.