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NPR
Half Of
Professors In NPR Ed Survey Have Used 'Trigger Warnings'
Anya Kamenetz
This school year, the University of Chicago has put the debate over
"trigger warnings" on campus back in the news. The University told
incoming freshmen that, because of its commitment to freedom of
expression, it does not support warnings to students about potentially
difficult material.
But amid all the attention to trigger warnings, there have been very
few facts about exactly how common they are and how they're used.
NPR Ed sent out a survey last fall to faculty members at colleges and
universities around the country. We focused specifically on the types
of institutions most students attend — not the elite private
universities most often linked to the "trigger warning" idea.
We received more than 800 responses, and this month as the issue once
again made headlines we followed up with some of those professors.
Here are some of our key findings:
About half of professors said they've used a trigger warning in advance
of introducing potentially difficult material. Most said they did so of
their own volition, not because of a student's request or an
administrative policy.
This was not a scientific sample, but it's one of the larger and more
representative polls to be published on the topic to date.
Our sample included 829 instructors of undergraduates. Just over half
of our respondents, 53.9 percent, said they teach at public four-year
institutions and 27 percent said they were at two-year institutions.
These instructors were overwhelmingly familiar with trigger warnings:
86 percent knew the term and 56 percent said they had heard of
colleagues who had used them.
But only 1.8 percent said, as of last fall, that their institutions had
any official policies about their use.
Let's define terms.
The term "trigger" in this sense originates in psychology, where it
pertains to people with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
For survivors of combat violence, sexual abuse or other trauma, certain
sights, sounds, smells or other reminders can bring on intense
emotional and even physical reactions, like a full-blown panic attack.
In the media and elsewhere online, language similar to trigger warnings
is often used more broadly to label material that concerns sexual abuse
or sexual assault, that is potentially racially or politically
offensive, or graphically violent or sexual. For example, when NPR
covered the fatal shooting by police of Philando Castile, an
African-American resident of the Minneapolis area, we included these
words: "We'll embed the video here, with the warning that it contains
images and language that viewers might find disturbing."
But the rules are different in a college classroom than in a
therapeutic setting, and both are different than when addressing a
general audience. Even some of our respondents who had supplied a form
of trigger warning as a "courtesy" or "heads-up" said they didn't
intend to give students a free pass to avoid uncomfortable topics.
In fact, the picture that emerges is of professors making private
decisions within the four walls of the classroom. Only 3.4 percent said
students had requested such a warning. Most instructors who told us
they'd used trigger warnings — 64.7 percent — did so because, they
said, "I thought the material needed one."
So what are the types of material that are most likely to trigger a
trigger warning?
Our respondents were most likely to say they had used trigger warnings
in reference to sexual or violent material. Racially, politically, or
religiously charged topics were mentioned less often.
"I have had students break down reading novels depicting sexual assault
and incest in my gender studies courses," a professor at the University
of North Carolina said in a survey response.
Joanna Hunter, who teaches sociology at Radford University in Virginia,
told NPR Ed last week that she has given a warning before explaining
the practice of female genital mutilation, within the broader context
of a discussion of cultural relativism.
Lauren Griffith, a professor of ethnology at Texas Tech University,
said that she gave warnings when teaching Native American students
whose religious beliefs required that they undergo a form of ritual
purification upon viewing images of death. However, she says, outside
of such specific situations, she doesn't believe that trigger warnings
best serve the cause of liberal education: "I think that trigger
warnings can and should be used in a limited number of situations, but
overusing them can create a situation in which students opt out of
learning experiences simply because they don't want to confront their
own assumptions about the world."
Hasan Jeffries, an associate professor of history at Ohio State
University, said in an interview that heavy emotions — even tears — are
parts of the learning process that he welcomes. He teaches
African-American and U.S. history.
He tells his students at the beginning of each course, "This is hard
history. It's hard to talk about, hard to absorb. It's filled with
trauma, sexual violence, racial violence, visual images of murder and
chaos. You may walk into my classroom and see an image of a lynching
that was put on a postcard. This is America."
At the same time, he adds, he's sensitive to the fact that many of his
students may have experienced, say, sexual assault or police violence
in their personal lives.
"I understand and take seriously trauma triggers," Jeffries says. "I'm
not hostile to one side or the other and I don't think there's an
absolute position."
None of the professors we talked to said that they had had a student
try to get out of an assignment or skip a class because of topics that
made them uncomfortable. The most common response to a warning was
either nothing at all, or at most, for a student to excuse him or
herself from class for a few minutes.
Jeffries, like other faculty members, told us that his department had
ultimately decided against issuing an official position on the use of
trigger warnings: "The general consensus was, we're not really
interested in putting those forward. We feel confident in ourselves as
teachers and in the maturity of our students."
Read this and other articles at NPR
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