[Chris O'Carroll]

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.