[Michael Cantor]

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

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

[Susan McLean]

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

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

We're guilty of this as well

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

Best,

Bill

[Michael Cantor]

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.

[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.

[John Whitworth]

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Alan Blaustein]

I'm concerned about how far this is going to go, assuming it goes anywhere. Will it get to the point of not assigning works essential for any developing writer? Beyond that, would we see a return to Bowdlerizing?

[William A. Baurle]

Of course Zappa was right! He would have made a great President, and I'd have voted for him.

I started out with a big bag of wind, but when I broke it down, I realized I had good objections for all of my points.

Here's my immediate problem: what film was this? There's art, and then there's garbage. I realize it's subjective, but still:

I can sympathize, and DO, very much so, with everything Rick wrote.

Then again, I can sympathize with a young woman who's been raped having to sit through offensive garbage, or even a good film with a scene depicting rape. I suppose if I were her I may have simply walked out and given my reason, without trying to increase the already silly over-nurturing and molly-coddling that's going on.

Then again, I haven't been raped.

[Andrew Frisardi]

And of course, the list of what might offend someone is pretty much endless. Who decides where to draw the line? The students? Which students? Etc.