Although this isn’t directly related to our topics at hand, I recently recalled a great article I read earlier this year that is relevant to today’s higher education. The September issue of The Atlantic featured a cover story, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, that raised a lot of questions about the way college students protect themselves from words and ideas that they don’t like in the name of emotional well-being. Their basic premise was that the hypersensitivity rampant on most college campuses is damaging both to students’ education and their mental health.
Students have more and more been using “emotional reasoning” as legal evidence; the argument “I feel it, so it must be true” is considered legitimate. For instance, a white student was found guilty at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The picture of the Ku Klux Klan rally on the book’s cover offended another student, despite the fact that the book valued the student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. Examples like this one show that it has been considered unacceptable to doubt the reasonableness of someone’s emotional state, especially when tied to group identity. Claiming offense to something has become “an unbeatable trump card.”
Something else very common among college campuses is the use of trigger warnings in class. Students assume that they know how others will react, and that reaction will be devastating. Preventing this becomes a “moral obligation” incumbent upon everyone. Some books that have been called out for trigger warnings include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (racial violence) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogyny and physical abuse). The authors point out that according to basic tenets in psychology, it is completely counterproductive to help someone with anxiety disorders avoid the thing they’re afraid of. Furthermore, it is detrimental to one’s education as a student and a person to just skip over the parts of history and literature that are uncomfortable.
The list goes on and on, and the examples get even wilder. One professor faced angry demonstrations after he lowercased the I in the word indigenous in a student’s paper, which she had capitalized; students claimed it was an insult to her and her ideology. One student wrote a satirical piece for a student newspaper about students’ hypersensitization to absurd microaggressions. He was terminated from another paper he wrote for and his dorm room door was vandalized with raw eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”
“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” Lukianoff and Haidt write. In terms of education (the point of college?), this atmosphere creates “intellectual homogeneity,” and in fact does a disservice to students by allowing them to think that they can make everyone agree with them. Instead, college should be a place where students feel intellectually engaged with diverse viewpoints and honest discussion. The way it stands now, we are perpetrating the idea that you can’t learn anything from someone who thinks differently than you, which is harmful to students’ learning process and mental development.
Real life doesn’t comfort people by giving them “trigger warnings.” College shouldn’t be a cocoon where we can snap our fingers and make all ideas we disagree with disappear. Instead, our college education should be equipping us with the skills needed to respond to people we disagree with in an open way, not in one that allows extreme subjectivity to reign and demonizes our opponents. We need, of course, to be respectful and sensitive to all students, but we need to do that while allowing for students and their opinions to grow and be heard. Universities need to rethink the type of student they want to develop.
I highly recommend you read the full article; it’s much more interesting than I make it seem. The authors go into a lot of other interesting things happening on campus as well as a sociological account of why this is happening with the current generation of students. Also, I’d be really interested in hearing people’s thoughts, because at it’s very nature, this is a sensitive topic. Do you see this sort of behavior on Brooklyn College’s campus?
