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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: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 20 2017, @01:35PM (1 child)
Oh, I remember that incident. That was about the dumbest kind of censorship possible. I'll let the certifiably black Larry Wilmore explain it [cc.com].
That said, there are certainly aspects of Shakespeare that I could reasonably imagine being "triggering" in the original sense of the word, namely causing somebody with PTSD or a similar problem to have a nasty mental health episode. Imagine, if you will, reading:
- King Lear as somebody who had actually had their eye removed as an act of torture.
- The Scottish play as somebody who had watched their children be murdered, or somebody who had chosen to save their unborn baby's life at the expense of his wife's life.
- Julius Caesar as somebody who had murdered a good friend.
Just because it's classic literature doesn't mean it can't be traumatic.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 23 2017, @02:10AM
If that's all you can think of, you haven't seen Titus Andronicus. Next to Titus Andronicus, all those others are pablum.
-- hendrik