Warning: This Class May Contain Literature

If you see the words “Trigger Warning” at the top of an article or blog post, it means the content could distress people who have suffered trauma, such as rape survivors or combat veterans.

Recently, several colleges have taken this principle much farther. Policies in place or being considered oblige professors to post trigger warnings in curricula that deal with all kinds of potentially upsetting subjects. A proposed policy at Rutgers, for example, flags The Great Gatsby for its depiction of misogynistic violence; Oberlin warns that Things Fall Apart depicts racism and colonialism. That policy, and a similar one on the table at UC Santa Barbara, have come under attack from academics and intellectuals who argue it will stifle discussion of important issues — and shelter students from the kinds of challenging ideas that are at the core of a university education.

Katie McDonough, an assistant editor at Salon, defends the idea of trigger warnings on campus. Existing university policies don’t do enough to support trauma victims, she argues, and trigger warnings can help. “We aren’t creating campus environments where survivors of sexual assault feel like they can sit in that classroom and feel heard and not feel like they’re going to be re-victimized by the way we talk about rape,” she tells Kurt Andersen. McDonough feels that accommodating students in these situations should be at the discretion of professors, rather than a one-size-fits-all policy from administrators.

But are policies like these just coddling college students who are, after all, adults? “I don’t think that people who are survivors of various traumas are saying ‘protect me,’ they’re saying ‘acknowledge me,’” McDonough says. “I don’t believe that it’s going to become a sweeping trend where students are going to weasel out of getting work done.” What’s more, she argues, the slippery-slope arguments leading to censorship are overblown. “Is this going to be the end of the free press? Is this going to be the end of free speech as we know it? Frankly, my answer to that is, no, it’s not going to be.”

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