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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: 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.