A month ago I had never heard the phrase “trigger warning”,
but now that I am up to speed, I am ready to issue one myself. I
must alert my readers that it is conceivable that this post could excite
stupidity in stupid people. So
if you are stupid, you may wish to quit reading now.
I
doubt that any reader is in the dark as to my allusion, but just in case…One of
the moment’s most publicized campus issues—which is rather different from
saying most important--is the
proposal that professors should preface their course syllabi, or perhaps even
their individual lectures, with warnings to students that they may find parts
of the course or lecture so disturbing, offensive, or even traumatic, that
they may choose to avert their psychic eyes, so to speak. Sexual violence is repeatedly mentioned
as being particularly triggerable, but in general so are, potentially, all
episodes of “sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism…and other forms of
oppression”. Oberlin College,
which has been something of a barometer of advanced academic sensitivity in
recent years, has been teased, perhaps unfairly, for floating a proposed trigger
warning policy now hastily recalled for further study.
It
seems a vapid truism that education is likely to be challenging; so maybe a
single alert to that effect, carved in marble at the college gate, might be
sufficient? Certainly any
literature professor knows that the stuff they read in college can really be
disturbing—such stuff, for instance, as the dismemberment of Grendel, the
blinding of Gloucester, the harpooning of Moby Dick, or Bill Sykes’s murder of
Nancy. Only a few writers are
sensitive enough to give their readers a heads-up. Chaucer, in introducing the “Miller’s Tale,” a narrative
positively reeking of sexual violence, sexism, ageism, geezerism, undergraduatism,
Biblicism, dandyism, and flatulentism, gives a trigger warning, and even
recommends that the sensitive reader should “turn over the leaf and choose
another tale,” one free of oppression and positively oozing with “morality and
holiness”. Of course, the only
result, so far as I can tell, is that the Miller’s Tale is the best known part
of Chaucer’s oeuvre.
God
knows, I could have used a few trigger warnings myself with regard to my
undergraduate courses, especially as regards ableism. My college career might have been measurably less stressful
if only my math professor, on the opening day of the calculus course, had said
quite openly: “Fleming, I have to give you fair warning. I don’t think you are going to be able
to do very well in this course.”
No trigger warning: May 4, 1970
Serious
matters do call for serious discussion, though they don’t always get it in the
academy. On May 4, 1970,
incompetent and undisciplined soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot to death
a number of students on the campus of Kent State University. Protest demonstrations sprang up at
colleges and universities throughout the country. At Princeton there was an emergency faculty meeting so well
attended that it had to be relocated from the hallowed Faculty Room of Nassau
Hall to one of the largest lecture rooms on campus. The President and Clerk sat on a spare, raised stage
that looked like a set for Waiting for
Godot, with the faculty before them in an amphitheatre of rows of fixed
chairs in graduated ascent.
There
was only one practical action that our faculty could take, and that hardly a
potent one--to pass a resolution about the Kent State shootings. Almost immediately, however, the
greatest minds in Mercer County seized upon an adventitious, peripheral issue
and shook it like a ferret. The
undergraduate managers of the campus radio station, WPRB, were at the gates, petitioning
to be admitted in order to broadcast the faculty meeting live. The request was unprecedented, but so
also, it seemed to many, were the circumstances that had triggered, so to say,
the demand. Should the faculty’s
deliberations, by long tradition held in
camera, now be broadcast to the world?
The
question was subjected to a searching debate of Talmudic complexity and
Jesuitical subtlety. There was
thrust. There was parry. All points of view were carefully
considered, especially those having nothing to do with faculty meetings or
radio broadcasts. There were more on the one hands, and on the other hands than one might find
in a large colloquy of Hindu deities.
I need hardly add that intellectual scrupulosity is seldom briefly
displayed. The discussion went on,
and on, and on.
At
some point the late, great Professor Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
and the father of the “paradigm shift,” sought and gained the recognition of the
chair. I shall remember what he said to the grave. Indeed, I believe I can
give you his exact words. “Mr.
President,” he said, “I submit that if the next hour of this discussion is as
stupid as the first hour, exposing the deliberations of the Princeton faculty
to any wider audience whatsoever could inflict irreparable damage on the
institution.” It was actually an
hour and twenty-seven minutes, but let that pass. The faculty voted not to go live.
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
