Last week, the University of Chicago sent a letter to its incoming freshman class, informing them that they were not entitled to what has come to be known in social justice terminology as “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.” The letter went on to say that the University’s new policy stems from its commitment to “academic freedom,” and that as such it would not rescind invitations to commencement speakers or cancel other public events because of potentially “controversial” content.
Setting aside any debates about the actual content of the letter (and there are surely many meaningful debates to be had), the fact that the University saw fit to write and distribute such a letter to its more than 1,500 incoming freshmen is both puzzling and, admittedly, kind of amazing.
Those who speak out against so-called “political correctness” on college campuses, as though it were as much a crisis as campus sexual assault, are often heralded by those on one side of the culture war as “brave.” While I won’t go so far as to attribute the University’s letter to any measure of courage, it is certainly risky.
The idea that college campuses act as incubators for generational shifts is almost a cliché at this point, but it’s certainly not a baseless one. As one of the most well-regarded schools in the country, the University of Chicago has the potential to at least change the conversation regarding the line between sensitivity and censorship tread upon by those who advocate the usage of trigger warnings in the classroom. Anyone familiar with administrative aversion to even the smallest controversy would balk at the amount of students, parents and donors that UChicago risked offending with their recent memorandum.
Dialogues about the usage of trigger warnings in college classrooms and the implementation of “safe spaces” is nothing new. In 2014, students at the University of California, Santa Barbara passed a resolution requiring professors to warn students about potentially triggering course content. Those in favor said that trigger warnings protect students with histories of abuse or mental illness from having to engage with materials in their coursework that may cause them to relive traumatic past events. The opposition (as did the UChicago letter) charged that trigger warnings, like safe spaces, were antithetical to what college is all about: opening up to new perspectives.
I do agree with detractors of this type of resolution who say that the simple concept of what is “triggering” has been diluted. A trigger is not something that is merely upsetting or off-putting. In the context of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder patients, a trigger causes vivid flashbacks to traumatic events, often prompting panic attacks and related symptoms. If you agree that students with mental illnesses should be entitled to the same accommodations as students with physiological disabilities, then the support of trigger warnings should come easily.
Of course, trauma triggers are as diverse as the population they affect, and almost anything imaginable could be a trigger. Obviously, it isn’t possible to warn every student about something that could be uniquely troubling to them in particular. However, I do feel that classes whose content involves things that are widely understood to be upsetting to large groups of people (such as sexual assault or suicide) should merit common-sense accommodations for students. Students who ask to read a different book or leave the room while a film depicting graphic violence is played for the class aren’t asking to be exempted from required coursework. All they want is to create an educational environment that meets their respective needs. We don’t ask students who are highly allergic to house pets to live with roommates who bring theirs along to school. As our conception of what constitutes a “disability” evolves to include mental illness, extending accommodations to those who experience trauma triggers -- nearly 8 million, according to the VA -- should not be controversial.
The same logic can be applied to the concept of the “safe space.” Students who ask for a space where they can express concerns without fear of being harshly criticized are not asking that certain topics stop being discussed in a larger context. All they ask is that there be times and places where community dialogue comes with reasonable guidelines. The letter that UChicago sent out to its incoming freshmen charged that such spaces allow students to “retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” One could just as easily argue that an environment where students feel too intimidated to speak up could also be detrimental to the “free exchange of ideas” the University sought to protect with its letter to the class of 2020.
At orientation during my own freshman year of college, I was introduced to the concept of a “brave space.” Participants in a brave space acknowledge that it is impossible to challenge harmful ideas without stepping on a few toes. As such, the “brave space” is critical of social justice rhetoric while simultaneously engaging it -- a concept I think the writers of UChicago’s most recent memorandum to its freshmen class could greatly benefit from considering.
