“Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm” NYT, May 18, 2014 | Bill Ayers

“Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm” NYT, May 18, 2014 | Bill Ayers:

“Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm” NYT, May 18, 2014

The call for “trigger warnings”—a recent censorious trend gaining traction on American college campuses—is designed to alert students of any potentially troubling, unsettling, or upsetting course materials. The impetus is benign enough, and the context includes the important recent mobilization to deal seriously with epidemic levels of rape and sexual assault on campuses across the country. But objections to this trend are also clear: art and literature, education and growth are characteristically disturbing. When a few years ago Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College, told a faculty meeting dealing with the discomfort some students experienced when exposed to criticisms of Israel that she thought no Barnard student should be uncomfortable in any class, I thought she had lost her way if not her mind. As a professor my goal was that every student would find in my classes every day the familiar and the strange, the comforting and the discomfiting—and I wanted to find those things for myself as well. I mostly wanted everyone to be moved to leap forward, to launch themselves into the going world, and to embark on voyages into the unknown.

The trigger warning—if it is to be used at all—should appear on the application to college itself: Please be aware that you will be challenged here, you will be exposed to ideas you cannot now imagine, you will experience times of cognitive dissonance and intellectual vertigo, and you will likely be transformed in some “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm” NYT, May 18, 2014 | Bill Ayers: