David French explores for National Review Online readers the negative impacts associated with so-called “trigger warnings” on college campuses.
Those are trigger warnings — declarations designed to prevent people from reading or viewing content they don’t like, declarations that are actually used to censor even the mildest forms of non-politically-correct free speech. And, apparently, they’re more popular than ever. The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported on the results of perhaps the first systematic effort to measure how many professors actually use trigger warnings in their classes. Those results are sobering:
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.
To be clear, these professors are embracing censorship even without the prompting of their academic institutions. Less than 1 percent of respondents indicated that their schools required such a warning. Even worse, professors were adopting warnings without so much as a single request from a student at their school. The only silver lining in this dark cloud is that the survey’s response rate was low enough to leave questions about the true extent of the problem. Still, as the Chronicle noted, it “provides a sense of the frequency of trigger warnings.”
An academic critic of trigger warnings called this “self-censorship.” I disagree. These professors aren’t self-censoring. They’re doing their best to censor others, to permanently adjust the terms of the debate to their favored words, their favored books, and their favored ideology. And they are doing so on their own, without the prompting of aggrieved students.
Nor are they compassionate. Joan Benlin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, gave the trigger-warning respondents the benefit of the doubt, saying that she was “struck” by the respondents’ “genuine feeling for the students.” Yet modern campus activists are hardly fragile flowers, wilting in the face of icky words. In fact, their alleged fragility is simply a tool of ideological warfare, a method of building sympathy — of making their demands palatable to a public that otherwise shuns censorship and intolerance.
