At Cornell, the Student Assembly passed a resolution calling for professors to issue trigger warnings, but the University President immediately rejected it as an infringement of academic freedom. (NY Times) It's just another round of an ongoing academic rumble but some things about it got me thinking.
It isn't that I have some kind of violent aversion to trigger warnings. I used to teach narratives of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland around the time of the First Crusade, and I always warned my students that they were disturbing documents. Whenever Holocaust survivors have spoken on campuses where I was teaching I always encouraged students to attend, but I warned them that the experience might be brutal. But I have two issues with the Student Assembly resoution.
First, the resolution defined traumatic content as "anything that might be graphic, violent or tends to incite traumatic memories for individuals that have been affected." I suggest that a close synonym for that phrase might be "history." I don't see how you can teach history without constantly refering to things that are violent and might stir up traumatic memories. The example given to the Cornell Daily Sun was a photograph of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. Which, ok, is pretty graphic, but if I were teaching a course about politics and social media (which this was) I might do something like that just to make the point about the power of brutal images. But honestly I have taught topics a million times more horrible than the death of George Floyd: the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Japan, the Atlantic slave trade, the brute facts of existence in worlds where most people were poor peasants beaten by their overlords and nothing ever changed.
Second, the resolution "would make sure that students can opt out of exposure to such content without being penalized." Sorry, no. If I'm teaching 20th-century history, you can't opt out of trench warfare or the Holocaust or the atomic bombs or the My Lai massacre. If you can't face the horror, you just can't study history.
Sadly I have a sense that for many young people this is true. They don't see any redeeming qualities in the past that would make it worth their while to endure the undeniable horrors, so they are turning away from the past altogether. Wokeness is not really leading to a surge of interest in topics like slavery or colonialism; instead it mostly inspires people to cut loose from history altogether.
1 comment:
Yeah, I thought that idea that students could "opt out" of an assignment went way, way, WAY too far. Especially appalling was the idea that it would be okay to "opt out" if the student "made up" the assignment with other work--as though topics for learning were purely fungible, and the goal of the course were really time spent at labor, rather than things learned.
I agree teaching history would be impossible with a provision like this. And not just history--even many of the pre-professional courses that are eclipsing the humanities would be affected. How could you teach psychology? Social rehab? Could students in marketing opt out of doing presentations? Could those in economics avoid studying unemployment ("my dad lost his job, and he started drinking . . .")?
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