Column: Acknowledging student experiences only improves learning

T rigger warning skeptics tend to turn into wizened old-timers when justifying themselves: It’s a rough world out there. Life is hard. Deal with it.

Joseph Epstein, writing  for The Wall Street Journal in late May, implied that the arrival of such disclaimers on syllabuses as part of larger attempts to cater to diverse student bodies amounted to a “reign of quiet academic terror.”

At worst, Epstein’s comments are patently offensive. How could he use the phrase “reign of terror” to describe an effort to prevent the re-traumatization of those who have experienced real, life-altering terror?

Educators, he writes, especially those without tenure, might avoid touchy-but-relevant material if forced to take into account the particularities of every student’s past.

And he’s right about this, but only in part. Trigger warnings need to function as part of a broader effort to humanize academia. Alone, they do have the potential to undermine rigor or diminish those who might otherwise benefit from them. Alongside robust student-educator relationships, they can make the classroom a positive and empowering place.

But Epstein and others go on to miss the point entirely. They paint a stark picture in which academic rigor and concern for the well-being of students are mutually exclusive. These arguments hint at an academic culture so impersonal that the emotionally frank notion of a “trigger warning” can’t help but sound absurd when placed beside it.

This is a culture that places studies before students, that glorifies all-nighters in the library above emotional and physical well-being. It’s a type of hazing, the promised reward for which is a lifetime of stable income and upward mobility. And so it only seems natural that some who have benefited from this system would balk at the upending of the hierarchy by allowing students to take real action on their own behalves.

Trigger warnings are a mere extension of human compassion into the academic world, where students and professors are too often required to dissociate themselves and their experiences from the content at hand. That’s not always possible, and when it isn’t, the consequences can be troubling.

When my mother was in graduate school during the 1970s, an undergraduate student committed suicide while taking a seminar on Virginia  Woolf, the modernist writer who also took her own life.

It’s unlikely that exposure to that course material was the direct cause of the student’s death. After all, the student knew what she was signing up for. But that doesn’t erase the feeling of helplessness experienced by her professor after the fact.

And that’s the tricky part. It’s impossible to tell in advance what will prove traumatizing for any given student. And it’s difficult to say whether the burden of disclosure should fall on the student or the burden of warning upon the professor. That’s why it’s so important for both parties to engage with each other on both personal and intellectual terms.

Even so, attempts to protect students in this manner may seem futile. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If there’s anything we can do to make the academic world a little less scary for those with most cause to be scared, we have only our hubris to lose by giving it a shot.