A Faculty’s Stand on Trigger Warnings Stirs Fears Among Students

Faith N. Ferber, a junior at American University, finds herself intensely drawn to a subject that profoundly upsets her: sexual violence. She focuses her studies on it, helps run a campus group that advocates against it, and hopes someday to have a career fighting it.

At the same time, she says, unexpected classroom discussions of the topic give her panic attacks — a reaction she attributes to post-traumatic stress disorder from being assaulted off campus just over a year ago. Such surprises can send her fleeing into a hallway or leave her rattled for days, she says.

To avoid classroom episodes, she has adopted a routine for the start of each semester. She combs course syllabi and asks instructors to give her some notice — a “trigger warning” — before exposing her to readings and discussions likely to provoke her anxiety.

Ms. Ferber says she requests trigger warnings mainly to steel herself against psychological discomfort, but she sometimes asks to skip a classroom session she cannot emotionally handle. “Nine times out of 10,” she says, “I am not going to have to opt out.” Her instructors have always granted her requests, she says. (In her two majors — psychology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies — the warnings are common, she says.)

She received no warning last month, however, when American University’s Faculty Senate took a step likely to complicate her efforts to avoid psychological distress. With the backing of Scott A. Bass, American’s provost, the senate unanimously adopted a free-speech resolution that discourages instructors from granting students’ requests to be shielded from certain readings or discussions.

The resolution says that faculty members can continue to issue “trigger warnings,” but only to prepare students to process material, not to suggest they can opt out of exposure to it. If students complain that instructional content will cause them personal difficulty, the solution is to direct them to support-services offices, the resolution says.

Students diagnosed with mental-health conditions can continue to get instructional accommodations, by working either through the university’s counseling and disability-services office or, in cases of only temporary need, through the office of the dean of students, university administrators say. But they will need to show medical documentation of psychological vulnerability to qualify.

Getting Out in Front

American University has taken its stand on trigger warnings at a time of intense national debate about their use at colleges. The warnings, which emerged from the clinical treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers, were first popularized in the media a decade ago, on feminist blogs and message boards that alerted readers when content might evoke traumatic memories of sexual assault or domestic violence. In recent years, college instructors — generally at the behest of students — have been issuing the warnings in relation to subjects such as racism, abortion, and suicide.

Critics argue that trigger warnings restrict campus debate and stunt students’ preparation for life’s stresses, while many defenders say the public attacks on them are motivated by ideological opposition to anything smelling of political correctness. Although conservatives account for much of that resistance, trigger warnings have also been assailed as threats to academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors and various free-speech advocacy groups.

American University had not experienced any significant controversy involving trigger warnings, but there had been signs of one brewing. The university’s library had asked Mr. Bass how it should respond to student requests to flag books for controversial content. And Sasha Gilthorpe, president of American’s student government, had run last spring on a platform that included a pledge to push for trigger warnings on course syllabi.

Mr. Bass, who wrote the first draft of the Faculty Senate’s resolution, says he initially set out just to update its stand on academic freedom, inspired by declarations on the subject adopted this year by the University of Chicago and Purdue University. The resolution was amended with language dealing directly with trigger warnings at the suggestion of Larry Engel, the Faculty Senate’s chairman.

The resolution “protects the student as well as the faculty member,” says Mr. Engel, who argues that both need to feel safe to speak freely.

Some students agree. After Mr. Engel sent students an email announcing the resolution’s adoption, Laura Turner, a junior majoring in journalism, wrote back, “Thank you so much for providing a wuss-free zone!”

Among students on the campus here last week, Nicholas Scida, a senior, called trigger warnings “an easy way to cop out of work.” Another senior, Megan Lapham, said: “Universities should not be a super-sheltered environment.”

The resolution has also been cheered off campus. The Atlantic, which last month published a cover story critical of trigger warnings, praised the resolution as “refreshingly direct and unambiguous” in defying threats to campus speech. The conservative National Review applauded it as a “welcome push-back against the craze for protecting supposedly fragile students.”

But the Faculty Senate’s stance has caused an uproar among other students. They argue that the senate, by assuming that trigger warnings threaten free speech and represent a means for students to avoid certain subjects, misses the whole point of the warnings: to let students prepare themselves to remain educationally engaged.

“This issue is not about free speech. It is about accessibility,” says Isabel Zayas, a sophomore at American who has been active in promoting campus awareness of mental-health concerns.

“I don’t understand how needing something for a disability correlates with my ability to critically think,” says Emem N. Obot, a sophomore who says her post-traumatic stress disorder can cause her to hyperventilate or have panic attacks when she is exposed to depictions of sexual assault or violence against people of color.

Sources of Stress

Mr. Engel, an associate professor of film and media arts, says the resolution is not an outright ban on trigger warnings. In fact, he personally plans to continue to use them before showing students films depicting rape or the Holocaust. But, he says, he wants to be sure any accommodation of students’ triggers is for “a medical reason,” and not in response to their views on matters such as race, religion, or gender relations.

In deciding to treat the evaluation of student requests for trigger accommodations as a clinical matter, however, American University has drawn attention to how ill prepared its student-services offices are to handle such requests. Students here complain that the counseling center is understaffed and underfunded, and that getting an appointment can take a week or more. “Shuttling every student who has the need for a trigger warning into therapy isn’t the answer,” says Ms. Gilthorpe, the student-government president.

Students Against Sexual Violence, a campus group that counts Ms. Ferber as a leader, says the faculty resolution “reflects an ableist viewpoint as well as a clear misunderstanding of trauma and mental health.”

Ms. Ferber, for her part, sees the process of getting a formal accommodation for disability as too complicated, and argues that she is better off advocating for herself than relying on a campus office to look out for her.

“There are countless reasons why students would not be able to get that formal accommodation,” says Ms. Gilthorpe. Students might lack recent documentation of a longstanding psychological condition, feel uncomfortable seeking counseling, or have had a complaint of sexual assault fall on deaf ears, she says. She cites the Faculty Senate’s failure to get student input before passing its resolution as “proof that the system does not listen” to students’ concerns.

Mr. Bass acknowledges that his university, like many others, is straining to handle a surge in the share of its students seeking help for mental-health concerns. American’s administration has embarked on a major overhaul of its student-services offices, he says, so they can better handle the workload. Ms. Gilthorpe and other student activists say they have been unable to get any reassurances from officials of American’s counseling center, who declined last week to be interviewed.

National experts on college counseling say their offices are generally not in the business of evaluating trigger-warning requests. Instead, the offices focus on treating whatever psychological problems have spawned those requests, and on referring students to disability-services offices for broad accommodation plans.

“It is not part of our job to wade into these conversations,” says Gregory Eells, Cornell University’s director of counseling and psychological services. Counseling offices generally resist students’ requests for excuses from educational assignments to avoid being swamped by such work, he says.

Mr. Bass says the Faculty Senate plans to meet with students on Wednesday to hear their concerns, but he believes their fears of impending psychological injury are overblown because instructors will continue “to work with their students and listen to them.”

“The faculty,” he says, “are not going to be cruel to their students.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.