Thursday, March 6, 2014

College Students Demand Content Warnings

Liberals afraid of having their sensibilities offended by education
One has to wonder how recent college graduates will survive for five minutes after leaving their university confines. The New Republic reports that students at several universities are now demanding “trigger warnings” on course syllabi for material that might make certain snowflakes uncomfortable.
On college campuses across the country, a growing number of students are demanding trigger warnings on class content. Many instructors are obliging with alerts in handouts and before presentations, even emailing notes of caution ahead of class…Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional.
. . . However, what is wonderfully perverse about the demand for trigger warnings is the effect that it could have on Cultural Studies. Off the top of my head, here is a list of authors and their associated fields of study that would require trigger warnings. This is just in the field of Literature, so feel free to add more in the comments.

African American Studies:
James Baldwin (Torture, Racism)
. . .
I guess if Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity is too painful for them, physics majors could insist on triggers to allow them to dodge anything beyond Newtonian physics.  You can do almost anything with Newton's math that that you can with the more advanced stuff, except explain the universe and build GPSs.

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