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Cambridge Uni students get Shakespeare trigger warnings
Shakespeare contains gore and violence that might "upset" you, Cambridge University students have been warned. The "trigger warnings" - red triangles with an exclamation mark - appeared on their English lecture timetables.
Lectures including Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus contain "discussion of sexual violence, sexual assault", the BBC's Newsnight programme has learned.
The university said the warnings were "at the lecturer's own discretion" and "not a faculty-wide policy". The lecture timetables were issued to this term's students by the university's faculty of English.
[...] Asked about the warnings, one Cambridge academic who did not wish to be named, said their "duty as educators was to prepare students for the world not protect them for three years". Prof Dennis Hayes from Derby University's education faculty said: "Once you get a few trigger warnings, lecturers will stop presenting anything that is controversial... gradually, there is no critical discussion".
Cambridge University said the English faculty "does not have a policy on trigger warnings", but added: "Some lecturers indicate that some sensitive material will be covered in a lecture... this is entirely at the lecturer's own discretion and is in no way indicative of a faculty-wide policy."
Forsooth!
Also at Cambridge News, The Guardian, and The Independent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tfried on Friday October 20 2017, @08:56AM (2 children)
Um, to start with your ramblings on the educational value boot camps: One of the primary lessons of a military education is to accept authority. In contrast, the ideal of an academic education is to teach critical thinking. I'm not going to argue that the two are mutually exclusive (and in fact a well rounded individual should be capable of both to at least some degree), but to put it mildly, it seems rather obvious that you're not going to teach one using the educational toolset of the other.
But to your question:
The same as any other warning. If you intend to require your students to work on tesla coils in your class, you better include an appropriate warning, even if your target audience is statistically unlikely to carry any pacemakers. If you intend to show a hardcore splatter movie half-way through your lecture, then it's certainly polite to hint to that from the start.
Warnings can actually be an important tool to increase the range of what you can teach. Challenging the political/religious feelings of big-donor-daddy snowflakes includes a real danger of ending your academic career, early. Including an appropriate up-front warning will reduce that risk a lot.
OTOH, this also leads us to see the deeper logic behind the proliferation of trigger warnings: Avoiding liability. I don't think colleges and lectures are overly afraid of hurting their students feelings. However, they are afraid of those lazy asshole students who will try to weasel their way through college by playing innocent victim. "Oh, I just couldn't do any better when faced with all that gruesome cruelty. How could I have known Shakespeare would be so violent! Give me my credits or I'll give you a shitstorm!" Now, I agree that trying to stop that by way of warnings is an obvious, but terrible strategy, as it just leads to the academic equivalent of the "don't touch the cooking plate while hot" warning.
So, yes, you can take the warnings too far, and clearly TFA is an example of just that, but that does not mean that warnings are bad in principle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @02:40AM
You're mostly right about the military, but there is the concept of the illegal order and the military does train people to deal with situations where an authority is unavailable.
You're wrong about college. If a student engages in critical thinking and refuses to accept authority, they might just decide that a professor is full of nonsense. The student might come to the unacceptable conclusion that Islam is associated with abuse of atheists, homosexuals, and women. The student might come to the unacceptable conclusion that diversity causes conflict, distrust, and misunderstanding. The student might come to the unacceptable conclusion that there are not in fact 72 different genders. The student might come to the unacceptable conclusion that Cuba is not paradise.
This idea of "critical thinking as long as you submit to authority" is not in fact critical thinking.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 23 2017, @02:19AM
I've seen Titus Andronicus when it was on the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario.
Short summary:
It's hard-core splattergore.