Despite widespread fears that trigger warnings hurt classroom discussion and threaten academic freedom, many college instructors appear to be adopting them on their own, without prodding from administrators or students, a new survey’s findings suggest.
The online survey, of members of the College Art Association and the Modern Language Association, found that more than half of respondents had at least once voluntarily provided students with such warnings, which involve advance notice that instructional material might elicit a troubling emotional response.
Nearly a fourth of respondents said they had voluntarily offered the warnings “several times” or “regularly,” according to survey results presented here last week at the annual conference of the American Association of University Professors.
The share of survey respondents who reported using trigger warnings dwarfed the less than 1 percent who said their institutions had a trigger-warning policy. It also stood much larger than the share of respondents reporting that students at their college had sought such an institutional trigger-warning policy, had requested that they provide a warning in a course, or had complained to them or to an administrator about their failure to issue such a warning.
“Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship,” DeWitt Godfrey, a professor of art at Colgate University and the president of the College Art Association, argued during a panel discussion of the survey’s findings.
A more charitable take was offered by Joan E. Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, which helped the MLA and the art association develop the survey. “One of the things that struck me from the responses,” she said, “was the feeling of genuine concern for the students.”
Safety and Silence
Ms. Bertin cautioned that the survey, conducted online through the website SurveyMonkey, should not be considered scientific. One reason is that the response rate was low. Although more than 800 instructors answered it, emailed invitations to participate had gone out to the more than 12,000 members of the College Art Association and the more than 26,000 members of the MLA.
Nevertheless, the survey, conducted in March and April, at least helps give a sense of the frequency of trigger warnings. The debate over the practice previously has centered on anecdotal reports of their use or proposals that colleges require them.
Having initially cropped up on several online forums for feminists, which use them to identify content that might distress victims of sexual abuse, trigger warnings became a source of controversy on college campuses early last year, when students at institutions such as Oberlin College, Rutgers University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara began calling for their use. Last September the AAUP issued a formal statement of opposition to trigger warnings, criticizing them as a threat to academic freedom and instructional quality.
Among the new survey’s findings, more than six in 10 respondents said trigger warnings had a negative effect on academic freedom, while fewer than one in 10 said they had a positive effect on it. More than four in 10 said the use of trigger warnings had a negative effect on classroom dynamics, while fewer than two in 10 said their effect on classroom dynamics was positive.
Of the respondents who offered lengthier comments in their survey responses, one instructor who described herself as a rape victim and lifelong feminist said, “I have no evidence that trigger warnings lead to anything but the cultivation of a posture of fear.” Another wrote: “We seem to be in a golden age of passive aggression, whereby the speech of others can be controlled or stopped if one feels ‘uncomfortable.’” Several denounced students’ demands for trigger warnings as narcissistic or as reflections of the students’ sense of privilege.
Other respondents, however, defended trigger warnings. They rejected the assumption that students were using them to try to get out of coursework, and argued that some experiences, such as rape or the death of a family member, are traumatic enough to justify students’ requests for accommodation.
Triggering Triggers
About 13 percent of survey respondents said they had once or twice received requests from students in their classrooms to provide trigger warnings, and just over 2 percent of respondents reported fielding such requests more frequently.
About 11 percent said students in their classes had once or twice complained to them or to administrators about their failure to use trigger warnings. Fewer than 1 percent reported being the subject of more-frequent complaints.
At last week’s session on the survey’s results, a member of the audience voiced concern that those on hand were disregarding the legitimate needs of students who had survived traumatic experiences. Ms. Bertin of the National Coalition Against Censorship acknowledged that some students may need help in confronting material that evokes trauma, and the emergence of requests for trigger warnings might reflect colleges’ rising enrollments of students from rough backgrounds.
For the most part, however, the people on hand viewed trigger warnings negatively. Among those in the audience, David Linton, an emeritus professor of communication and media arts at Marymount Manhattan College, said he had not seen any research showing real harm to students from exposure to material they found uncomfortable.
In the humanities and social sciences, he said, “we are in the business of triggering.” He said courses in those areas should not come with trigger warnings, but trigger guarantees.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
