No trigger warnings yet on classes at Kansas, Missouri campuses, but profs still worried

Mount Holyoke College dumped its long-standing productions of the play “The Vagina Monologues” this year because, its theater board concluded, “the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.”

Narrow because it explores feminine identity in a way that leaves out transgender women.

Lauded as a clever merger of art and feminism when it debuted nearly 20 years ago, the play’s known a history where it once was more likely to drop jaws simply with its focus on female anatomy.

In fact, it still runs at the University of Missouri and tends to shock Columbia audiences more for its explicit dialogue than for slighting any sliver of femininity.

Those reactions — that the work of Eve Ensler is dated feminism, or that the work is overly provocative — reveal a difference between an East Coast liberal arts college for women and a public Midwestern school.

Yet Midwestern schools also worry that campuses could wind up too sensitive about too many things to deal with controversy in classwork.

Conservatives roll their eyes at ivory tower political correctness — what they often see as an obsession with victimhood.

Liberals argue that something as painless as a word choice here and there can go a long way to making more students feel welcomed.

Meantime, colleges try to teach a wide range of students — evangelical, gay, blind to privilege, immigrant — to refine their critical thinking and emerge sturdy enough for a sometimes-ugly real world.

College professors say they can feel caught in the middle in ways that make it harder to talk candidly with students about anything verging on controversy.

“There is pressure from both sides,” said MU faculty member Nicole Monnier — from the sometimes oversensitive left offended by seemingly innocent language and from the increasingly suspicious right that sees college faculty as liberal brainwashers.

Now come “trigger warnings.” Such preambles give a heads-up to discussions of violence, sexuality, race or merely points in history that might traumatize some unknown fraction of students.

In the last two years students at the University of Michigan, Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Oberlin in Ohio, Rutgers in New Jersey, Scripps in California and Wellesley in Massachusetts all pressed their schools for warnings about troubling passages in films, books, lectures and art displays.

At the same time, a series of critiques now argues that U.S. campuses tend to sheath young people in intellectual bubble wrap. The critics include many instructors.

“It’s a noble impulse,” Monnier said. “But part of me wonders if we’re hurting students’ ability to deal with life. After all, they will eventually leave our campuses.”

Look far enough across the higher education landscape and you’ll find one faction or another insisting on sensitivities that others find absurd:

▪ Late last year at the University of Michigan, Omar Mahmood lost his column at the student newspaper after satirizing trigger warnings and conversations about privilege.

▪ A professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara tangled with anti-abortion protesters on campus. She ultimately pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of theft and battery. But she found solidarity among various academic circles after saying photographs of fetuses triggered her actions and violated her right to “go to work and not be in harm.”

▪ Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk wrote in The New Yorker in December that “students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. … Students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word ‘violate’ in class — as in ‘Does this conduct violate the law?’ — because the word was triggering.”

▪ In July, the University of New Hampshire removed a “bias-free language guide” from its website that warned against using the word “American” and counseled against using the word “poor” to describe someone’s economic status.

The guide’s authors said it aimed to encourage critical thinking about language, not to censor discussion. The university issued a statement declaring “speech guides or codes have no place at any American university.”

College cocoon

Defenders of trigger warnings say they fit uniquely into college classrooms. Young, often naive students find themselves grouped with almost random strangers exploring subjects that can stir strong emotions.

“It’s the decent thing to do,” wrote Sean Trainor, who teaches history and humanities at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla. “It is simply a sign of respect for one’s students, for the wrenching process of learning, and for their ability to make informed decisions about their education and welfare.”

Most academics trace trigger warnings to online forums among people subjected to sexual assault. When some participants began to recount details of their attacks, others insisted on trigger warnings so they wouldn’t revisit their own trauma.

In time, that migrated to campuses, particularly women’s and gender studies programs where rape is a regular topic.

From there, trigger warnings move to other disciplines.

The American Association of University Professors weighed in against the practice, saying “this movement is already having a chilling effect on our teaching and pedagogy.”

A draft policy considered, then abandoned, at Oberlin suggested warning students of discussions of “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism” — things seen exclusively from the vantage of somebody who identified as male or female at birth and continues to see themselves as that gender — “ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”

An instructor navigating so many topical landmines would find it difficult to step into any subject, said Hans-Joerg Tiede, member of the committee on academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors.

“This idea of not offending or upsetting or challenging students came from the right 20 years ago,” said Tiede, a computer science professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. Now, he said, it comes from a variety of directions.

Labeled as leftists by conservatives, college faculty have long chafed at suggestions that they don’t make room in the classroom for a range of political views. Several public schools in Missouri have adopted statements of “intellectual pluralism” promising that sort of openness — a move widely seen as reacting to criticism from conservative Republicans who dominate the General Assembly.

Faculty at various universities in Kansas and Missouri said they’ve not heard their students ask for trigger warnings, but dread that day is near.

“It’s hard to predict what will upset people,” said Charlene Muehlenhard, a professor of psychology and women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. “If someone has been traumatized, it’s very hard to predict what might be upsetting to them. … So what do you warn them about?”

Yet she and other professors also say a good instructor briefs students about what to expect in class. It’s less formal than a trigger warning on a class syllabus, but serves the same purpose.

“The stuff we’re talking about is not safe stuff,” said Clarence Lang, chairman of the African and African-American studies department at KU. “I don’t think you can sanitize social inequalities, racism, misogyny. What you can do is make sure that people discuss these things in a climate of mutual respect.”

Or what if, like MU professor Stephanie Shonekan, you teach a class about hip-hop and wander into the inevitable discussion about using the N-word? And your white students don’t understand why the black students are offended when the white kids sing along to rap with the taboo word in the lyrics?

“The white hip-hop heads are kind of stunned by what the black hip-hop heads say about the N-word and the use of it … that it really matters who’s saying it,” said Shonekan, an ethnomusicologist and chairwoman of MU’s Department of Black Studies.

Professors say that they watch their language, that they’re aware students might be sensitive, even oversenstitive, to what comes up in class.

“It’s part of being an instructor. But we’re not sugar-coating our learning,” said Fred Guzek, a marketing and management professor and president of the Kansas State University Faculty Senate. “It’s not as if they’re in a protected cocoon.”

Many in academia say accommodating the outlook of a wide range of students doesn’t require censoring course work or employing trigger warnings.

“If we’re not pushing students a little bit out of their comfort zones,” said Deborah Curtis, provost and chief learning officer at the University of Central Missouri, “then we’re not helping them.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 7:47 PM with the headline "No trigger warnings yet on classes at Kansas, Missouri campuses, but profs still worried."