A New Entry in the
Annals of Academic Cravenness
If colleges won't stick up for free speech,
why would they
oppose the implicit censorship of 'trigger
warnings'?
For those who have not
yet caught up with it, in the academic world the phrase "trigger
warning" means alerting students to books that might "trigger"
deleterious emotional effects. Should a Jewish student be asked to read
"Oliver Twist" with its anti-Semitic caricature of Fagin, let alone
"The Merchant of Venice," whose central figure is the Jewish usurer
Shylock? Should African-American students be required to read "Huckleberry
Finn," with its generous use of the "n-word," or "Heart of
Darkness," which equates the Congo with the end of rational civilization?
Should students who are ardent pacifists be made to read about warfare in
Tolstoy and Stendhal, or for that matter the Iliad? As for gay and lesbian
students, or students who have suffered sexual abuse, or those who have a
physical handicap . . . one could go on.
Pointing out the
potentially damaging effects of books began, like so much these days, on the
Internet, where intellectual Samaritans began listing such emotionally
troublesome books on their blogs. Before long it was picked up by the academy.
At the University of California at Santa Barbara, the student government
suggested that all course syllabi contain trigger warnings. At Oberlin College
the Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to steer clear of works that
might be interpreted as sexist or racist or as vaunting violence.
Movies have of course
long been rated and required to note such items as Adult Language, Violence,
Nudity—ratings that are themselves a form of trigger warning. Why not books,
even great classic books? The short answer is that doing so insults the
intelligence of those supposedly serious enough to attend college by suggesting
they must not be asked to read anything that fails to comport with their own
beliefs or takes full account of their troubled past experiences.
Trigger warnings
logically follow from the recent history of American academic life. This is a
history in which demographic diversity has triumphed over intellectual
standards and the display of virtue over the search for truth. So much of this
history begins in good intentions and ends in the tyranny of conformity.
Sometime in the 1950s,
American universities determined to acquire students from less populous parts
of the country to give their institutions the feeling of geographical
diversity. In the 1960s, after the great moral victories of the civil-rights
movement, the next obvious step was racial preferences, which allowed special
concessions to admit African-American students. In conjunction with this, black
professors were felt to be needed to teach these students and, some said, serve
as role models. Before long the minority of women among the professoriate was
noted. This, too, would soon be amended. "Harvard," I remember
hearing around this time, "is looking for a good feminist."
All this, most
reasonable people would concur, was fair enough. Then things took a radical
twist. Suddenly women, African-Americans, and (later) gay and lesbian
professors began teaching, in effect, themselves. No serious university could
do business without an African-American Studies Department. Many female
professors created and found an academic home in something called Gender
Studies, which turned out to be chiefly about the suppression of women, just as
African-American Studies was chiefly about the historical and contemporary maltreatment
of blacks. Something called Queer Studies came next, with gays and lesbians
instructing interested students in the oppression of homosexuals.
Over time, the themes
of gender, class and race were insinuated into the softer social sciences and
much of the humanities. They have established a reign of quiet academic terror,
and that has made the university a very touchy place indeed.
Meanwhile many of
those students who in the late 1960s arose in protest have themselves come to
prominence and even to eminence as professors in their 60s and early 70s.
Having fought in their youth against what they thought the professorial old-boy
network, they now find themselves old boys. Unable to discover a way to replace
the presumably unjust society that they once sought to topple, they currently
tend to stand aside when students and younger professors cavort in bumptious
protest, lest they themselves be thought, God forfend, part of the problem.
University presidents
and their increasingly large army of administrators have by now a 50-year
tradition of cowardice. They do not clamp down when students reject the visits
on their campuses of such courageous or accomplished women as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine
Lagarde or Condoleezza Rice
because their views are not perfectly congruent with the students' own jejune
beliefs. When students and younger faculty line up behind the morally obtuse
anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement, wiser heads do not
prevail, for the good reason that there are no wiser heads. The inmates, fair
to say, are running the joint.
The trigger warning is
another passage in the unfinished symphony of political correctness. If the
universities do not come out against attacks on freedom of speech, why should
they oppose the censorship implicit in trigger warnings? The main point of
these warnings, as with all political correctness, is to protect the minority
of the weak, the vulnerable, the disheartened or the formerly discriminated
against, no matter what the price in civility, scholarly integrity and
political sanity. Do they truly require such protection, even at the price of
genuine education?
Nearly 200 years ago
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book on American democracy, feared the mob of the
majority. In the American university today that mob looks positively
pusillanimous next to the mob of the minority.
Mr. Epstein's latest
book is "A Literary Education and Other Essays," published this week
by Axios Press.
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