Trigger Warnings, Academic Freedom and the Changing Nature of Reading
by Jen Reid
Should Canadian colleges and universities put warning labels on course content? Debate over such “trigger warnings” has been ongoing in American post-secondary schools since high-profile controversies erupted at the University of California Santa Barbara, Oberlin College and Columbia University in 2014 and 2015. At each school, faculty members were told to issue warnings for course material that could trigger students who were sensitive to topics ranging from sexual assault to class discrimination. The question of whether to implement trigger warnings is a growing concern in Canada.
The furor began with Oberlin College’s policy on trigger warnings. It said that “anything could be a trigger” in a text and should be labelled by instructors. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was used as a primary example of “a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read” but that could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”
At Columbia, four undergraduates wrote an article for the school’s newspaper in which they suggested that the faculty should be required to use trigger warnings to prevent students from being traumatized by course content—something the authors believed happens “all too often” in the post-secondary classroom. They cited a case at Columbia in which a survivor of sexual assault revealed that she felt “triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and that her feelings were exacerbated by the professor’s presentation of the text. When she brought her experience to the professor’s attention, she felt her concerns were dismissed. The student stopped participating in class discussion “as a means of self-preservation.”
The idea of a trigger warning is thought to have had its genesis in online feminist forums and blogs. Borrowed from the language of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the trigger warning is a strategy to indicate images and texts that could cause an unwanted reaction based on past trauma, especially sexualized violence. Trigger warnings function much like film ratings, content warnings for TV shows and parental advisory labels for explicit song lyrics. The onus is on consumers to choose the right content for themselves, and creators and distributors are free from responsibility for people’s experiences with the content.
Trigger warnings have also been compared to systems of categorization for books, such as the Library of Congress Classification system or that of any community library. They distinguish, for example, between literature for children and adults, between genres such as biography or mystery, and between subjects such as slavery or forensic chemistry. These tags give readers some idea of the content and are generally considered useful. The trigger warning, in the context of higher-education classrooms, is envisioned as a similar tag that goes one step further to become a reasonable, compassionate, “fact-based” way of preparing students for exposure to material that may disturb them—or helping them avoid it altogether.
The debate among higher-education professionals and students, and across popular media, reveals that the trigger warning is viewed either as appropriate, cautionary shorthand or as unnecessary emotional “coddling.” These contrasting views tend to emphasize the controversy’s emotional and psychological dimensions. In addition, the prospect of faculty being forced to use trigger warnings in institutions that have historically been environments for the critical exploration of challenging topics is seen as a potential infringement on academic freedom. There is further concern that trigger warnings will prejudice readers against content before they read it. The Canadian Association of University Teachers has declared that trigger warnings undermine freedom of expression and academic enterprise because they “encourage censorship, and the inappropriate surveillance of the classroom.”
We don’t yet know if there is a connection between student mental health and curriculum content. We also don’t know whether trigger warnings, where they have been applied, have mitigated negative student reactions and/or affected academic freedom. There is, however, enough anecdotal evidence to entrench each side of the controversy.
To understand this polarization, it’s helpful to look at how our identities as readers have evolved. If we drill down to the core concepts driving the debate on trigger warnings, we’re confronted with a few questions: How do we read today? Has reading changed? What happens to us when we read? It’s perhaps because these questions are so big and pressing, and the potential answers so varied and uncertain, that we feel passionately about how the trigger-warning debate may affect our freedom to read or teach texts—or our freedom to not read or teach texts that may cause harm.
Supporters of the trigger warning promote it as a way to give students more control over what they read. They espouse a new relationship between texts and readers, and they want to level the power imbalance between teachers and students. In this changed relationship, students’ identities as readers are prioritized.
These ideas speak to an underlying conviction that any text can impact a reader’s life. They indicate a widespread belief that the act and content of reading can produce emotional, psychological and/or psychosomatic effects in the reader. They suggest that these effects can disturb, even destroy, personal identity, social relationships and people’s lives. They recognize reading and the text as symbols and agents of authority, and wish to ensure the individual rights of the reader against this authority.
It’s not surprising that so many people have come to these conclusions. Our ideas of reading come from long experience with the power of the book. These include the promotion of reading as essential to individualism, as a way to improve the self and as a necessary ingredient in becoming an educated and well-adjusted member of society. We endorse mass literacy and mass education because we believe in the power of reading to achieve these goals.
These ideas developed before reading entered the digital realm. Now, experience of digital environments is reshaping our relationship to reading and the text. As it turns out, “materiality matters.” Early, limited research on the effects of reading digital and printed formats suggests that readers’ emotional reaction to what they’re reading, especially levels of “empathy, transportation, and immersion,” will vary depending on the format: people seem to have stronger emotional reactions to print. It is entirely possible that today’s primarily digital readers are inadequately prepared for the emotional impact of reading in print that previous generations take for granted.
In the digital environment, especially on social media platforms, today’s readers are accustomed to having more control, influence and interaction with the texts they read and a more direct connection with and potential impact on content, authors and other readers. Online readers can use metadata descriptors such as hashtags and can create links to sort, classify and disseminate text and images across the Web, thereby exercising power over how others perceive and react to content. Readers establish supportive communities online with their own rules of reading and censorship, and can shape and influence other readerships. Readers on the Internet are at once producers and consumers of the texts they read. Social media posts and fan fiction are great examples of this phenomenon.
While theoretically anything can be posted and anything can be read online, social rules have developed in relation to readers’ personal identities so that people expect to be warned if something that might affect them negatively is just a click away. What we read, how we read and when we read it is also being affected by innovations in cognitive computing and by new-generation algorithms (or bots). These bots do more than track, store and predict our online reading behaviour and interests. They write the texts we read and, in combination with cognitive computing, tailor our reading experience to our emotional states, beliefs and social lives.
When so much personal involvement affects how we read today, is it any wonder that today’s student readers want just as much control over and connection to the texts and images they are exposed to in institutions of higher learning? When the profound effects of cyberbullying can be felt in many young people’s lives, is it surprising that they are keenly sensitive to the power of words? Against this backdrop of readers having such direct involvement in what they read in the digital sphere, the idea of reading a prescribed classroom text with unknown contents arbitrarily selected by a figure of authority is perceived as a personal threat.
In the end, Oberlin College retracted its sweeping trigger warnings policy because of heavy faculty opposition. The debate, however, is unresolved and emotions are running high. How do we bridge the gap between sides while preserving academic freedom and respecting our changed identities as readers in the digital age? Through the study of text and media. Educators and students alike need to learn about the act of reading over time and increase their media literacy skills. This education will help people understand the current trend to pathologize reading (and the reader) and to overemphasize its effects on the person. Developing a more objective and skilled approach to reading will allow us to continue exercising the fullness of the human imagination to grapple with both the triumphs and challenges of human existence and to learn from them.
Linda Roland Danil, “Trigger Warnings, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and International Security”
“Trigger warnings became a prerequisite that I dutifully fulfilled in much a similar manner as any bureaucratic undertaking. I found, and still find, that at best, trigger warnings are somewhat infantilizing and condescending, and at worst, they are an obstruction to freedom of expression.”
Kate Manne, “Why I Use Trigger Warnings”
“The point is not to enable—let alone encourage—students to skip these readings or our subsequent class discussion … Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.”
Jen Reid is a professor in the Book and Media Studies Program at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.
Reprinted from Freedom to Read Kit 2017.